I don’t mind RMT. I don’t mind spoiler sites. I think that every player should be allowed to play in the manner and style that they prefer and have fun with. I do not think that a player’s fun should be limited or crippled. Personally, I enjoy walking through quests using spoilers. Lazyness has little to do with it, its just fun for me to “reverse engineer” a quest. I don’t like puzzles or riddles. Now for people that do, they have the choice to not read spoilers and enjoy the sense of “discovery”. If they advance slower, then that is their choice that they chose in order to enjoy their style of gaming. Any pressure that they may feel to advance quickly is a product of their own perception. However, the disparity is felt a lot stronger in MMOGs that require 3+ players to progress, rather than on MMOGs where the solo player can advance at his own pace without pressure to “keep up” with friends.

After all, we have a much larger base of players today, than we did back in the days of MUDdom, (to which I believe that 75% of current MMOG players think MUD is something you get mixing dirt with water) and you have to expect that each player has their own idea of “fun” and different methods of getting enjoyment out of a game. I have to agree that the lines of “cheating” is becoming more and more blurred with each new generation of MMO gaming. But I do feel that a company has to be set in what regulations and rules of conduct they wish to set forth to their players, and firmly enforce them.

Now something that I find unacceptable, is the advertisement of RMT inside of these games, via Chat channel or /tell spamming. How long will it be before we see non-gaming sites, like say a direct reseller site like Buy.com, Amazon.com, or even porno sites, advertising their URLs in chat spam. There is a serious market available in the large MMOGs.

If there are legal regulations against non-RMT companies advertising in an MMOG , then the same expectation of rules and consequence should be applied to RMT sites. If not, then its the responsibility of these MMOG hosting companies to work together to set some international standards, maybe even laws. Something as simple as pressuring the server host/ISP provider to shut down the offending RMT sites would be a great start.

So to sum up my point: These are multi-player games. As the multiple player base grows with each new year, the perception of expected, and accepted, social morality needs to flex and accept that everyone is different in what they consider “enjoyment” of their games. I strongly agree that all “cheating” is, is just a violation of the spirit of the rules. Rules and laws are not set in stone, as a matter of fact, the foundation of democracy allows for flexiblity, challenge and re-examination of laws by anyone in the society. That goes for what is expected of “acceptable social behavior”. Change is inevitable, and what we once considered taboo, is now considered acceptable, often normal.

@Anticorium
Some examples :
Make a game with default inventory space that is way to small. Sell inventory expansions in the gameshop. Sell speedbuffs (game has default slow travelling speed).
Let a player with normal lvling through quests end up with about 20silver at lvl10. At lvl10 they can purchase a horse for 200silver. They can either chose to grind the money or of course buy it in the shop.
XP buffs, same idea. As long as you make an interesting feature that is only available to high lvl players you can build in real chores to get there. So you can sell items in the gameshop to make those chores more bearable.

Are you really trying to justify cheating? I can go along with an exchange server even though I prefer not to join it, but by your definition here it almost sounds like you approve of cheating in the literal sense. Should we now allow hacks and exploits to be used regularly?

RMT is going to be liked by some and despised by others. The only real solution is an exchange server, unless of cours, you suggest forced RMT be now solidified as a basis for all games, but the thing that gets me in this is how you seem to legitify actual cheating. What kind of game would we have if we actually allowed real cheating within the world.

As for RMT being the same as a strategy guide, I don’t see that connection. I’m not going to jab at those that choose to use it, but it, and strategy guides are 2 very different things. A strategy guide can train and ready a person for the challenges ahead. RMT on the other hand, removes the mechanic entirely from the players hands and takes care of it for them.

Simply, cheating is getting an advantage by breaking the game’s rules.

All games by definition have rules. It is what makes it a game, whether it be a computer game or a real life sport. All games have different rules, but you agree to follow the rules of the game you choose to play, otherwise you are a cheater. You can’t outright say one thing in particular is cheating. Soccer fans would say picking up the ball is plainly cheating. What would American football fans say about that in *their* game?

Heh Raph, that rules list brings back quite a few memories of Legend. Although I remember when it was a bit shorter.

I agree with this ~ the games these days require you to grind non-stop to achieve end game gear/experience content. Anyone can play, but to achieve end game/in game materials you need to play with a large guild ~ and to do end game content means getting a raiding spot in a good end game guild. This usually requires non-stop end game instance farming at level cap. There is no ability to achieve these things without constantly grinding or being part of a hardcore guild (and being part of a hardcore guild means constantly playing). If paying someone to help you progress is necessary because spending 8 hours a day in the game is not enough then something is wrong with the game (or the player who just will not quit… you decide).

World of Warcraft had implemented a PvP system that was designed as a pyramid. The more someone played, the more they were rewarded and only those who played the most could be rewarded those items. They tell people it’s not OK to pay for help, but the only way to get to the top is to play 24 hours a day (and sometimes that is not enough).

I think another thing that may have changed is simply the attitude of gamers in general. It is not as much about enjoying the game as it is about competition. The e-peen thing has gotten out of control ~ maybe it has a lot to do with the types of people playing the games these days. I do not feel MMOs can continue moving in the direction they are ~ people will sooner or later simply realize (through evolution or self destruction) the current designs are flawed. Developers will need to build the games enabling people to experience and enjoy the full game without needing to spend real money/absurds amount of time to do it. MUDs have been around, but the MMO community as it exists today is fairly new… Anyone who has not seriously considered paying someone to help with grinding/buying money is either extremely broke (and by broke I mean making less then 10 cents an hour) or simply has no interest in experiencing everything the game has had to offer. The purists do exist… in their mothers basements… shitting in waste baskets as south park so elequantly depicted. That is todays MMO.

An aside, this article on game security is interesting. Has anyone read the book yet?

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/461/1

There are some strong statements about the gamer culture in there indicating that getting this culture interested in security will be hard. Given that, the standards will have to come from the business community adopting virtual worlds for serious games.

does anyone have specific comments on the radical measures that are being applied to kill RMT in Runescape?

>looking up the steps to a quest was once upon a time a bannable offense on many muds, and widely considered cheating.

It still is on some MUDs (or, indeed, worse: if you publish a strategy guide for MUD2 and don’t take it down when asked, you don’t get banned, your characters get obliterated). This only really works for small-scale virtual worlds, though, because the people who know the steps to quests also appreciate how much fun it was figuring it out, so don’t reveal what they know in walkthroughs.

>Cheating is, in the end, violating the spirit of the rules. But the spirits of games evolve

What irks me about this is that the evolutionary pressure is very one-sided. Let’s say a game world starts with no RMT, and everyone has fun, then along come some RMTers and they spoil the game, so people leave. This is “evolution” of the spirit of the game, yes – the RMTers are driving out the anti-RMTers, leaving only RMTers, don’t-carers and pretend-it’s-not-happeningers. However, where can the anti-RMTers go to get a virtual world which doesn’t have RMT? They want such a place, but as soon as they find one the RMTers follow them there and “evolve” that one’s spirit, too.

Richard

‘Cheating’ is bypassing challenge

Cheating is simply a violation or disregard for the rules of the game. Bypassing challenge is just a common directive driving the intent or decision to cheat. It is a cause and effect of the act of cheating, not the definition of the act.

There are games where bypassing challenges (usually through a window of opportunity) is perfectly acceptable within the rules of the game, or even encouraged, or the whole point of the game itself.

Is using the Warp Pipes in Super Mario Brothers cheating?

The problem with “in the spirit of the rules” is that there are an awful lot of people who don’t see anything wrong with doing something, if the game lets them do it.

One result of the digital medium is that users have a high expectation that the game will “physically” prevent them from bending or violating the rules that form the structure of the game. In the case of MMORPGs and the like there is also a high degree of player anonymity and a difficulty on the part of the game moderators to identify and expel rule breakers. These factors and more have contributed to the decline of the “spirit of the rules” so to speak.

For example in traditional game mediums such as the physical chess board the medium is not preventing you from cheating; but doing so defeats the purpose of the game, destroys the integrity of the game, and will get you kicked out of official tournaments. In digital games of chess however the medium itself usually does indeed prevent you from making an illegal move at all.

On the issue of RMT as we know it in traditional MMORPGs, it is an important element of the game that the players are not restricted from trading items and virtual currency. However, since the medium itself is not restricting the act of trading there is nothing restricting RMT other than the rules as laid out by the EULA and the tenacity of the game’s moderators to identify and remove offenders.

So if you want to enable in-game trading of virtual goods:

Do you ignore RMT?

Do you dedicate game moderator resources to prevent it?

Do you try to cash in on it by facilitating secure RMT transactions knowing it’s going to happen anyways?

Is there even a “right” answer?

And a side comment:

Yeah, some of it can be attributed to design decisions, but a lot of it is also laziness on the part of players I think. We have a culture of instant gratification, and people are unused to having to really work at something in order to “win”.

I think what you’re observing and attributing to laziness is actually a result of the growing gaming audience incorporating people who play video games for reasons other than fiero. These people are not looking for a challenge, they’re looking for things like an interactive narrative, or something to “play with” not “play against”.

We always called quest walkthroughs “qinfo”.

I remember the cultures surrounding qinfo on several muds. They were like secret societies with handshakes and rules to prevent the game administration from discovering that you cheated. There were rules on how often people could cheat their way through a quest, particular things they were supposed to do wrong in order to make it look to a snooping wiz that they were solving it on their own, etc…

Raph,

As one who lived in LegendMUD for several of my college years, I’m curious as to what was bannable offense back then.

I remember the macros we had to get from one time/city to another and I remember being told certain things were a no-no but I can’t remember them know for the life of me. I’ve been playing MMO’s ever since those days and I’m just curious to see how it’s changed myself.

IIRC, wasn’t multi-boxing “frowned upon” as well? People paying extra money so they could circumvent the traditional grouping mechanics of the game. Of course, since the money goes to the game company, its not considered “cheating”, but I do recall players having a great disdain for multi-boxers in the early days.

The other thing to note, whether it be MUDs or traditional MMO’s, there’s an awful lot of material in the larger games today and the companies making the games don’t necessarily like writing and providing all that documentation. There’s the initial opening for fansites to pop up and fill in the documentation gaps, and the natural extension for helpful players to continue the documentation into more specific strategies.

If MMO companies did a better job of documentation within the game worlds, there’s an outside shot you might see the strategy sites start to be called “spoiler” sites again. (eg. Why can’t my class trainer give me more information about my spells?)

When you rely on third parties to fill in the gaps, you have to take the good with the bad.

I have 2 sons, 9 and 7, who are both playing Pokemon. One usually is ahead of the other the their games and recently they started arguing about when to help each other. They finally settled on the idea that they would help each other only if the other made a reasonable attempt to solve it themselves.

Personally I tend to use wikis or guides if there aren’t many in-game clues about which items are more powerful or which people I really need to talk to. I don’t always have the time to figure an optimal use of resources or to talk to everyone to find the one person I need to talk to continue on. I don’t trust the designers to always have priced things so that more money means better object.

I’ve recently had fun with Dwarf Fortress and rediscovered the fun of trying to figure out the best ways of doing things. The game is fun to lose (even if starting over can be a long process).