[...] F2P News There and (mostly) Back Again; A Solstice Greetinglinks for 2007-12-20Live Gamer: an official RMT platformMTV declares music industry "broken" — and backs it upDavid Byrne and Radiohead's [...]

[...] and Raph both throwing down their reasoning behind it all.Background :Raph : A post regarding Lifegamer site i.e. for Official RMT Trading.Tobold : His response to Raph’s post pertaining to Livegamer as well as to RMT curbing.Raph : In [...]

[...] sites:Gamasutra: Q&A: Live Gamer's Schneider reveals MMO item-trading platformRaph Koster: Live Gamer: an official RMT platformReacties [...]

[...] initial contracts to provide publisher-authorized secondary markets. As usual, I agree with Raph that this is so much of an inevitability that it should be uncontroversial. However, what LiveGamer [...]

[...] support of the game companies themselves. Several companies, including SOE, back the venture. Raph thinks that “Will the gamers like this? Flatly, no. At least not publicly. But a heck of a lot of them [...]

[...] stops here again… This topic won’t go away; it’ll be oft-discussed, glazed over, resuscitated again and again to be only horribly killed off in some fashionable way until the next press wire strikes [...]

[...] Raph Koster blogged about Live Gamer, a Real Money Trading (RMT) company whose goal is to legitimize RMT and other gaming services that are on the black market, as it were. [...]

[...] Raph’s Website » Live Gamer… by Shinji [...]

many, many players who are in Virtual Worlds to escape their low-status, low-income lives. = someone without a job

And in a world where RMT is necessary to have best items and to progress, anyone who does not pay the extra cash is forced to endlessly farm and grind just to stay level with the Joneses. = people who have lots of time win in games based on time sinks

Isn’t RMT, as run by the Developer itself, even MORE damaging then grey market RMT?

Depends what controls the developer puts in. Many of the side effects can be ameliorated by setting up controls on the dev side — like removing transferability of purchased items, detecting frequent purchases and adjusting game balance to cause them to spawn more, or affecting XP gains based on whether an item was purchased, etc etc.

The case could even be made that by offering the right things for sale (say, pre-twinked characters) you could reduce the effects you are talking about, like the “sinister new controllers looting guild banks.”