I personally feel the genre has evolved just enough to have some standard rules that need to be followed. One of them is some sort of ingame currency. People get this. Replacing that with something completely new (like decaying cash or a barter-only system or the never-explained “we don’t use money anymore” Star Trek | Earth-only thing) would be a hard sell to your staff, much less the VC/management, and then the public I’m sure it could be done, but it’d be an indie-level success that’d need to rise way above any other indie ever did for it to create a success big enough to be emulated. And it couldn’t be the only idea in that game to garner the sort of attention it’d need to attract players.

So you have ingame currency and people who want more of it. RMT as a result, with the ongoing (and recurring) talk of restricting how it moves between characters, and why:

Peter S. wrote: replace “RMT” with “Class Balance” conceptually.

Thank you for helping me realize I wasn’t the only one espousing the “keeping up with the Joneses” angle.

Richard Bartle wrote: Trade is not socialisation, it’s trade. You can socialise just as much as you could before; what you can’t do is trade with random people. OK, so perhaps public auction houses can be allowed, if you want to help solo players (it won’t bring in that much more RMT).

But then you’re down the path of listing useless items with inflated prices to complete the RMT transaction. And you’ve got your data monitoring algorithms trying to find the patterns and collecting the batch of this-month’s permaban-ees. It’s really no different than what current happens except you’re proposing to moving the direct inter-character trade function to guilded-only members (which really would only extend the time of the transaction from “get 1,000 gold now” to “get 1,000 gold in a week”). And more restrictions does impede socializing in some ways, because the harder something is to do, the less likely it’ll happen (heh, epiphany). Gifting your friends who just joined the game with gear or gold is the same thing really, a way to help them out, brag about your achievements, show them their own futures, all rolled up into a single gesture.

Slyfeind wrote: If a game is fun, then nobody would RMT.

RMT is not about buying fun nor getting around boredom. It’s about jumping a specific hurdle to continue why you were there in the first place. Raph’s started a new post about strategy guides, which I’ll be reading next (long holiday = lots to catch up on). But to me, RMTing in this regard is something similar to strategy guides. Most people do not follow a step-by-step guide to getting ahead in a game (unless they’re on their third alt). They use the guides to get over a particular hump, a raid boss, a quest location, etc.

I’d love to know how much a person is a repeat RMT-er, and why (if at all, and outside those games built on microtrans).

Peter S.>I would answer that by saying, on principle, that inhibiting socialization is contradictory to the core point of having MMOs.

Trade is not socialisation, it’s trade. You can socialise just as much as you could before; what you can’t do is trade with random people. OK, so perhaps public auction houses can be allowed, if you want to help solo players (it won’t bring in that much more RMT).

Richard

Nice dodge, Morgan. Yeah, I don’t see much reason to continue either, unless you want to address my concerns directly.

So, personally, I think the goal could be stated as crafting new (hopefully better) answers to these questions in the design of our games. Does that echo anyone else’s thoughts?

Precisely! No reason to gum up a game with bad advancement systems and boring encounters. Let’s let the player have fun out of the box. If there’s content that players would rather skip over, then that content needs to be reviewed, adjusted, and/or removed from the game.

You know, I just thought of another UO-related nugget of truth.
Gold farmers got PKed and their loot taken. There weren’t many gold farmers on UO.

Problem solved in 3 sentences? Amazin.

Quick addition to the above: replace “RMT” with “Class Balance” conceptually.

“How come he can solo the Jabberwock and I can’t?”

Neat, huh?

I think the point about RMT, “powerlevelling” and “gold farmers” is that “gold farming” is disruptive to other people’s gameplay, while “powerlevelling” really only affects the person who pays for it.

Maybe. That rather depends how much of the content is (non)instanced. Whereas gold farmers are incentivized to find out-of-the way places with little competition, power-levelers exist right in the critical path.

In WOW, what have you run into more:
gold farmers?
or people cutting in on your quest mobs at light speed with a higher level assist?

If people knew (or thought) those higher level assists were Chinese Power-Levelers, I think they’d generate even higher CS volume than they already do.

Perhaps Good Johnny wanted to meet up with friends to hear about a girl he liked? Or maybe he was interested in what was happening in the real world?

Interesting, but kinda unrealistic. Those goals can be accomplished without grouping in our hypothetical game.

What if those long and hard hours earning experience points were actually incredibly entertaining?

Aha, this is the crux of my argument. What if those hours of earning experience points were more entertaining, enriching, and provided greater social contact for Johnny? What does he need the sword for? Why does he need the levels? Honestly, you make it sound as if Johnny hates meeting his friends, really doesn’t want to, doesn’t care about the sword, and would much rather fight monsters all by himself and stay at the level he’s at. But for some reason, he RMTs his levels and the uber-sword and rushes to meet his friends. Really, it seems to me the only reason Johnny RMTs anything right now is to fit your argument…so I’m rather confused. Give Johnny his sword for free. Don’t make him pay money for it.

If you change the product in such a drastic way, what’s the approving segment to think?

This isn’t anything new. Stuff gets cut out of games all the time. Some content doesn’t even make it to the consumer, and dies on the white board. A lot of stuff gets published but goes unfinished. Whole areas are abandoned because players just don’t find them interesting, and devs don’t deem those areas worthy of further attention.

One example is me playing EverQuest about an hour ago, and I thought “Wow, Clan Runnyeye is kinda boring. I wish they’d give it a make-over.” But I understand why they don’t. It’s wasted man-hours, compared to what else they could be doing.

Richard:

I would answer that by saying, on principle, that inhibiting socialization is contradictory to the core point of having MMOs. (My bias: my own experience as a lowly player is such that I’m nearly always soloing, and not because I wouldn’t like to group. Social interaction within MMO contexts is frustrating enough as it is.)

I am only speaking in the abstract here, though, and ignoring such philosophical distinctions as profanity filters and the like.

To build on that, though, I personally interpret Raph’s original statements as partly speaking to the fact that RMT is a business transaction that many find repugnant, sure, but one with social components that are worth preserving even in the face of RMT. Parallels can easily be drawn to other abusable liberties, where preservation of the liberty is (much) more valuable than the elimination of the perceived abuse.

I think the point about RMT, “powerlevelling” and “gold farmers” is that “gold farming” is disruptive to other people’s gameplay, while “powerlevelling” really only affects the person who pays for it.

There are other side-effects of RMT in the real world, but those are not really points of discussion for gameplay design.

And yes, “gold farmers” exist because of scarcity. How disruptive they are depends on how scarce the resources people want to get are.

In City of Heroes, Influence is in fact remarkably easy to come by, and even the most powerful Enhancement Inventions don’t boost the character’s abilities by so much that they’re “must-have” items. Costume parts are easily available, and powers are inherent in the character not the gear.

As a result, “influence farmers” in City of Heroes are rare.

By the way, I enjoyed this discussion very much, and while we were certainly “argueing”, I never thought we were really “fighting”. Of course the limitations of discussing via blog entries tends to blow up disagreements out of proportion.

If I understood him right, Raph and me agree that the amount of RMT in a game can be modified very much by changing the game design. That is already a very strong common point. I get far more annoyed by devs with an “my game was perfect until the gold farmers ruined it” attitude. Game design affects player behavior and desires. Why Johnny needs the Big Bad Sword of Badness or the extra levels depends on whether the game design determines that not having them separates him from his friends. The gold farmers just follow the demand, and the demand is caused by game design.

Just give up on even trying. RMT will never go away, and if it did, it would be because the game was so un-fun to play, that no one would play it. The only thing left to try then would be to flood the world with so many awesomely rad item’s that those who RMT would either go broke buying them and stop playing, or get so rich they would stop playing while they negotiated to buy a small island off Hawaii.

So far the discussion of RMT seems to focus on convinience. Ok, so now newbie-players purchase characters instead of equipment… You might claim that equipment == levels, but you might also claim that characters == equipment. Wholesale bypassing is more annoying than players making smaller upgrades RMT. Take away the smaller upgrades and you encourage big upgrades.

In a PvP game, RMT makes the game corrupt. Some of the fun in a PvP game is that after being humiliated you go plan your revenge and work towards that end (timed consumables are a good thing IMO as you’ll have to pick the target you “hate” the most. LOL.). I don’t want to play a PvP game where you have to pay to get your revenge… That sucks and smells of extortion.

Remove all stats from all equipment.

Compared to other games the time between expansions in WoW is relatively long, and the time to level up is relatively short. Thus in WoW many people spend a lot of time at the current level before the next expansion comes out. They keep playing because they can still (slowly) improve their characters by acquiring better and better gear. While I’m certainly known for ranting about raiding being not accessible enough, I do think that removing raiding would harm WoW’s popularity. And if you remove all stats from all equipment, the raiding game is pretty much dead.

I would love a little bit more “world” MMO in WoW, but I believe that the “game” MMO for the achievers is driving subscription numbers here (note the difference between paid subscription and free membership for something like Habbo Hotel). I don’t think a WoW with stat-free equipment would have anything like 9 million subscribers.

On the other hand removing stats from gear nicely solves the RMT problem. Very few people would object to others spending money on gear that just looks good, but doesn’t advance them in the game. Hey, even I bought a house in UO on EBay (although I considered the game not having enough space for everybody to place a house to be bad game design).

What you would wind up with was something else becoming the player-to-player currency, and gold being used only for NPC transactions.

Which is why I emphasize that “the rest of the economy needs to be designed in concert with this approach.” If every object in the world had a trading lifespan like this, then there wouldn’t be anything that could become a de facto currency. If everything is perishable, I suspect RMTing might become vanishingly effective. It makes it impossible to maintain the kind of huge asset pools that I imagine a large successful RMT broker needs.

I’m not really sure why you mention that fungibility is the first principle of currency. (Admittedly, not being a currency expert, I may not fully understand the implications or even the full definition of fungibility…) In the real world I agree that fungibility is useful for a currency: my dollar bill should be equivalent to your dollar bill in every meaningful way. Things just get too complicated otherwise. However, in a virtual world where value rules are reliably enforced by a server I don’t think it’s as important.

Liquidity is also impacted by limited-transfer currency, but I don’t think perishability ruins the utility of currency entirely. It still serves a purpose for players and can still be useful. It also allows limited transfer of value between friends, which I think is absolutely vital to a strong social experience.

One possible RMTer laundering scheme that could work under my scheme would be as follows: buy some item from an NPC using end-life gold, and then sell that item back to the NPC for fresh gold. This laundering can be discouraged in several ways. One would be to mark the items purchased with perished gold as perished themselves; don’t provide any means for the players to convert perished objects to their non-perished equivalents. This seems a little extreme, but would certainly prevent laundering of the form described above.

Another approach would be to allows it, but make sure that it’s a very non-zero-sum transaction: purchasing the item from the NPC should cost a lot more than the value gained by selling it. (Just as many, if not all, games do now.) This would mean it’s possible to launder perished money, but at a significant cost. The question is whether it would introduce enough friction to prevent RMTs; I think the answer is no but that maybe you don’t have to prevent it entirely, just make it inconvenient enough so it’s not very common, particularly on large scales. (Although given the persistence of many RMTers in games like WoW, this would have to be very inconvenient indeed…)

(Maybe the trick isn’t to kill RMT, it’s to keep it from scaling well?)

(Forgive me, I don’t pay close attention to these discussions, so someone may have already made a point similar to this.)

Why does currency have to be the same kind of hard asset it is in the real world? To fight the RMT problem, if it is possible, you probably have to focus on things that are uniquely controllable in a virtual world, since bartering and markets naturally emerge in reality…

What if a given piece of gold only had a life-span of, say, three transactions? This would limit gold from bouncing around an RMT market fairly dramatically: a player could get it from an NPC and spend it at an NPC shop, or optionally give it to a friend, but that friend would then only be able to directly spend it at an NPC shop. A player could sell objects to other players, but the purchaser would have to be the one who earned the money spent, and the vendor could only spend earned money at an NPC shop.

To support this you would clearly need an item system that didn’t allow easy money-laundering via NPCs. Also, this doesn’t prevent the simplest form of gold-farming, although it does make it more burdensome since each farmer would need to execute transactions using the farming character rather than funneling it through a central RMT representative (which I assume is what happens now…)

I suppose this is basically the closest you can get to making gold bind-on-pickup, and I don’t actually know if it would work, but it seems like an interesting idea… Would currency even be useful if it had this sort of restriction? Does it overly restrict a virtual economy, or is something this drastic required to prevent RMT from emerging? Would measures like this actually have an effect on RMT, or would people find some way around it? (Obviously the rest of the economy needs to be designed in concert with this approach…) A very interesting problem.

People do buy influence for cash, because influence can buy some stuff. But CoX does stand as an example of a fun game not entirely dependent on raw stats and the gear that adjusts them. It just isn’t a huge success either though.

I don’t want folks thinking I’m overly harping on the idea of success. But I do think it important to consider when trying to “solve” problems in this genre. The more successful a title, the more likely its ideas will be emulated by others looking to get a piece of the action, seeing certain features as a “demand” they can provide a supply for.

Unfortunately, some games that have had really good ideas which would work in any DIKU, haven’t really be big enough to create that demand, so they languish. For example, being able to teleport players to you, being able to sidekick up and down, being able to customize your appearance without affecting your abilities, all of this stuff is fantastic. But the demand hasn’t reached a crescendo for them to become standard.

Ola wrote: Why? Habbo is viable. And well, chess is viable.

Hehe, that’s where I said “none of the successful ones really have any appeal to the crowd currently getting all up in arms about RMT”. Club Penguin, Habbo, Audition, all have lots of accounts. None are built the same way as WoW though, and there’s really not a lot of crossover between the audiences for those and the DIKU crowd (in my opinion of course, but it seems to be the case).

So these ideas need to find their way into a game that would also appeal to this audience, or we won’t ever know if they’re viable for this audience.

Peter S. wrote: So, in the context of this discussion, would you consider LotRO’s direct connection of character traits to in-game achievements (the Merits and Deeds system) a step forward, backward, or sideways?

Just my opinion, but I think this is a step sideways. It definitely allows players to customize their characters further (as they confer new abilities and displayable things like titles). They also can’t be traded at all. But they are another part of what a character does achieve and there is a certain amount of scarcity to it (depending on spawns and resources). So it doesn’t solve achievement, but it can’t be touched by RMT (unless the character itself is sold).

I think this whole discussion is missing something. For all modern MMOs, or at least all of the ones I’ve played anyways, money==time. And anytime that equation holds true you will have RMT, because for some class of player it will cost less than his time is worth. But you need RMT to keep that player, because, in general, he won’t want to be “wasting” his time.

Want to get rid of most RMT? Get rid of the artificial time gate of money sinks or gear farming. Sure, you’ll still have RMT for ‘prestige’ items, but I don’t see that as anywhere near the problem that RMT traded for time is.

Surprisingly, what you propose is pretty much exactly what »The Chronicles of Spellborn« does (or intends to do, as it isn’t released yet). They don’t have stats on items and intend to deliver many choices. I think it will be the closest to see how it turns out.

So, in the context of this discussion, would you consider LotRO’s direct connection of character traits to in-game achievements (the Merits and Deeds system) a step forward, backward, or sideways?

Also, I think Maple Story is an argument both for and against the core premise. It shows that people will pay real money for graphical fluff, but on the other hand that in itself demonstrates (as does Guild Wars) that strong motivation and desire exists even in a stat-free context.

“Haha, he paid 100USD for black dye? What a moron.” Not a big threat to the power hierarchy?

Raph, you said earlier that tubs of black dye in UO were traded on eBay for substantial sums of money. Did black dye confer any stats? I never played UO, so I don’t know.

In Guild Wars, dye (which does not confer stats) was one of the most sought-after items in the early economy.

For much of the time I played WoW, the trade channel was clogged with people looking for an enchanter who could give them the “red glow weapon enchant.” They had no idea what the enchant was called, much less what stats it had. They simply wanted their weapon to have a cool, red glow like that guy they just saw run past.

Don’t many Asian MMOs directly sell items to their users that have stat value, but are merely cosmetic?

It would seem to me that appearance and prestige are, if anything, more powerful motivators for many players than stats are, and that they are thus even more likely to lead to RMT. Am I missing something obvious from your plan, here? I’m genuinely asking because I often overlook the obvious.

True, you can also make eq consumables, easy to get, but rot quickly. Like regents or focal objects for magic. Items you need to enable skills to kick in. Or make cloths containers for such focal objects. E.g. in order to cast a spell you need a black coat, a handkerchief, and a fresh yellow flower in the right pocket. Etc. Then getting them in a timely fashion becomes the issue, which means knowledge of the environment rather than hoarding.

I think your opening statement is a misnomer. It’s not about removing relevant stats from gear. It’s about removing much of the DIKU from the DIKU

If you make advancement all event-based, you’re changing the primary motivation of play from hitting numbers to completing tasks. WoW and EQ2 both did a good job here in that the bulk of XP comes from the quest turn in, rather than the mobs you killed along the way. I consider SWG mission terminals sort of a proto version of this. Though they were mostly rinse/repeat, they at least wrapped the grind in some narrative. Sure people will AOE kite anyway, but they’re not progressing near as much faster as they would have in EQ1.

Further, in both modern DIKUs, you can get fairly well equipped with quest rewards alone. This will get you to the endgame. You’re back to the old Raid ways to progress beyond, but even in easy-to-level-cap WoW, most people are really not Raiding.

I still think the concept of levels and abilities locked behind them makes sense as a longterm reward, and a way to customize a character. But stat-less gear would be an interesting experiment to try.

Unfortunately, it needs the scale of at least an EQ2 success to really tell us if it’s viable. And I’m not sure anyone who’s got the money to make a DIKU is going to take that risk.

So, we need to extend our view beyond the AAA purchase/install variety, to games with much success but which a) have no gear; and, b) maintain meta-goals and rewards. These other games change the idea of persistent customization to something more aesthetic-based, either on their character(s) or in their virtual dwelling. And they work as well.

Unfortunately, none of the successful ones really have any appeal to the crowd currently getting all up in arms about RMT