RMT talk time!
Tobold has a post up today about the subject, quoting a well written article from Zen of Design by Damion. I’ve made a few comments on Tobold’s blog, but felt the need to get into more detail here.
First off, we are talking about RMT in a game NOT designed for RMT. I could care less what happens on the few EQ2 servers that support RMT, or what happens in the browser-based land of cartoon micro transactions. I care about MMOs that are monthly subscription games with a competitive environment.
Next it’s important to keep things in context. We are trying to keep things fair in an online game world. One step to achieve that fairness is to limit outside factors and keep everything that happens in that world subject only to factors in the world itself. In other words, not have some players start at max level, while others start at level 1. Or not to reward all player characters that start with the letter C, while penalizing all characters starting with D.
Since we are talking about monthly sub games here, the way a developer makes money is by having a player subscribe for as long as possible, which means providing content that takes as long as possible to complete. If it was possible to achieve everything in a sub based MMO in the first month, very likely a large portion of that player base would leave after their first month, having seen and experienced everything. Hence we have long grinds and ‘carrot on a stick’ mentality objectives, with the more extreme rewards being on increasingly longer grinds.
The key balance issue is how to reward those with lots of time, while still keeping those with less time competitive enough to keep pace. This is the reason upgrades at the highest level are so small compared to early game upgrades. Going from a green item to a blue is a noticeable change, while the difference between T5 and T6 is far smaller.
We still reward those with more time, but good design will limit that advantage enough to keep those with good skills but limited time competitive, while still giving the power gamer reason to stay. Compare the old honor system with the one Blizzard has now. In the past, only the very elite made the highest ranks due to the pure amount of dedication it took to reach such levels. No amount of skill could compete with the overwhelming importance of time. The new system still rewards those with more time, but also allows those with less to keep pace. Skill factors in as well; those with higher skill will require less total time to achieve a reward, and the very upper level rewards (2000+ arena rank) are reserved for the top skill teams.
So how does RMT factor into all this? RMT replaces the ‘time’ baseline, instead factoring in real world money, an outside factor. Now the balance of power is no longer a formula of skill + time, but skill + money/time, where any amount of time can be replaced by money. And since unlike time, money is not strictly a limited factor, you could easily overwhelm the skill factor with large amounts of money. How many times have you seen a fully decked out character playing terrible, and just assumed the character is Ebayed? As bad as the PuG scene in WoW is now, imagine if half your group was ebay characters, people just messing around with their new toy? Now what if instead of just wasting your time in WoW, that ebay player costs you a fleet battle in EVE, costing your Corp billions of ISK or territory control?
The challenge of balancing a competitive MMO are difficult enough without the added frustration of RMT, as more often than not RMT is simply used as a crutch due to a player’s lack of skill and or time, and in a truly balanced game the RMT would offset the skill factor more than time. No matter how you design a game, certain players will attempt to cheat the system to get ahead, and I view RMT as just one tool in a cheaters arsenal, little different than steroid use in sports or sneaking notes in to a test. You are bringing in an outside factor to overcome your own lack of performance compared to others.
Hardcore Casual 
If I may, I’d like to disagree with you on this topic.
I understand that RMT favours those with extra money on hand to spend on MMO’s. I can see that that gives them an advantage over another player who simply doesn’t have that kind of income.
However, if a player has more time to spend than another (even if it’s just an extra hour), after a while, the first player is going to be more advanced in the game than the second one, even if their skills are exactly the same.
One of the reasons I quit playing WOW was that, once I reached level 60 (I’m pre-BC) I simply didn’t have the 6 or 7 hours needed to go raiding with my guild, so I was left with nothing to do in game. Maybe this isn’t the best example, because even if I had bought my character off of E-bay I still wouldn’t have to time to raid, that’s true.
But let’s suppose I stopped playing for a month for some reason. When I come back, all my friends are leveled up, with better gear and amazing abilities, while I’m still in the beginner’s zone. Why shouldn’t I be able to spend some extra cash to have someone level up my char so I can rejoin my friends? I’m not saying it would be fun, instantly gaining 20 levels. There wouldn’t be any sense of achievement, for sure, but I would still get to play and have fun.
I think it all comes down to the fact that some have time and some have money. If I can spend my time, why shouldn’t someone else be able to spend their money?
Just my two cents here :)
I think you might be reaching a bit for your wrap up on how RMT might cause harm. Do you go into a PUG today in WoW assuming people know what they are doing? I don’t.
And in EVE, I would assume any good corp would vet their people better.
Of course, the EVE analogy falls apart because you CAN buy and sell characters there… heck, you can buy ISK indirectly from CCP… and of all the forum threads I see, I do not see any long tirades against the bane that is purchased accounts and time code selling.
It is all just a perception about what is fair. Going to an outside service for in-game currency is currently viewed as unfair, cheating. But I’ve already lived through times where twinking alts was viewed as cheating as was going to external sites for game and quest information.
If the MMO player base gets to a point where buying currency isn’t viewed as cheating, you’ll see the game companies open up their own currency service and most of the side effect ills will diminish drastically.
I have to disagree with your premise as far as it applies to current games. An ideal game would allow those with little time to remain competitive with those with lots of time, but I don’t know of ANY MMO on the market right now that has pvp where that is true. The game is already unfair, the use of RMT makes it more fair for those with little time, though obviously those with piles of time would disagree.
If you play WoW, and can only play 1 hour a day, no matter how skilled you might be with your character you will never be competitive with someone who plays 8 hours a day 7 days a week. You wouldn’t even be a challenge. The difference between T5 and T6 might not be that great, but the person with 1 hour a day doesn’t have T5. Or even T4. You can say “but they can get pvp epics”, and sure, they can. Eventually. But by the time they’ve earned enough honor for a single epic or two (a frustratingly painful process since they can’t kill anyone and die constantly) blizzard has released a new tier of items that the hardcore have already fully decked themselves out in, making the gap even worse. If you want to know what it’s like for a player like this, take a brand new level 70 character into the current battlegrounds. Play a gear dependent class like a rogue or warrior, and see how you fare.
The other thing of course, is that the whole thing is a silly argument anyway. In a game like WoW, even with UNLIMITED gold you could never gear your character as well as a raider. You could become competitive, but they’d still have better gear. All the best gear in WoW is BoP, so those who can devote the most time will always have the best gear. So how does RMT invalidate them, exactly?
Finally, in talking about RMT in a game like WoW you’re talking about gear discrepancy, not skill discrepancy. Someone who only plays 1 hour a day could be every bit as skilled a player as someone that plays 8 hours a day. WoW is not a skill based game, the degree to which skill plays a part quickly hits a cap, beyond which it’s purely gear based. Therefore, how is it ‘fair’ that in a contest between equally skilled casual and hardcore players, the casual player doesn’t really stand a chance? If you play 1 hour a day, and spend that day losing over and over and over to people that aren’t any better than you, just have more purples, can you understand the desire to level the playing field a bit by buying some gear?
When I played WoW I had enough time to grind out the gold to get the gear myself, but I understand the frustration of being trounced, not by skill, but by piles of ‘phat epix’.
I care about MMOs that are monthly subscription games with a competitive environment.
The main difference between our two attitudes, not only to RMT but to other issues as well, is that I do not consider WoW a competitive environment. If WoW was a race, then it would be one where the different runners were starting at different times, ran for different amounts of time per day, and were finally judged on how far they got. It is obvious that you can get further by simply running more, without necessarily running faster or better. As a competition, MMORPGs are a joke. It is only the naturally competitive attitude of some people that sometimes makes them appear like that.
But in reality you can’t win WoW any more than you can win a game of castle-building in the sandbox.
So why do they have sand castle building competitions? :)
You can’t ‘win’ in WoW as in seeing a ‘game over’ screen, but you certainly can win in terms of world firsts or bg/arena wins. The fact that out of 10 million subs, only perhaps 500,000 actually care does not change the fact that 500,000 do still care.
That said, WoW has one of the lowest levels of competition, partly due to its size and partly due to its design. But something like EVE, as everyone knows, is ‘serious business’
When you look at this you can see it from several different points of view.
First you can look at it as an academic design problem, in which case RMT is probably just a variable that changes the way you end up designing other parts of the game. Either you design RMT into the game or you don’t.
Second you can look at it as a player who wants the game to be ‘fair’ and ‘fun’ and a whole bunch of other intangible adjectives. That’s the subjective element that everyone argues about. There are enough pro’s and con’s on each side that you could argue either side effectively forever.
The most important way to look at RMT though is from the business point of view I think. Since MMO’s are a product and the companies who make them are trying to make money, then that’s what it’s really about. You want whatever model leads to the largest number of subscriptions. So, do you cater to the player who spends 40 hours per week or the player who spends 4 hours per week? I’m guessing you reach some kind of compromise. For example, Eve allows players with extra RL money to buy time codes for other players in exchange for game money. In that case the only people who are ‘cheated’ are the people who are at either extreme end of the spectrum: Either the people with both time AND money to spare, or the people with NEITHER time nor money to spare. I’m guessing that the vast majority of users fall in the middle somewhere, and the number of people who object are vastly outnumbered by the number of people who benefit. Even a sweat shop in Asia where they have 12 year old kids playing 60 hours a week for a couple dollars pay will have paying subscriptions. There’s no problem with them doing that until it becomes a problem for other subscribers (ignoring the fact that it’s a TOS and EULA breach). In Eve you could see asteroid farmers as a bonus to the PvP crowd because it makes ships cheaper to buy. On the other hand it makes the game difficult for real mining characters because they may show up at their favorite asteroid belt and find that it’s completely gone.
The end goal of the developement team is to keep the carrot just far enough out of reach to keep the majority of players pulling the cart. Sometimes that’s going to mean that a few players will actually get to eat a carrot while others will realize that they’re never going to get that carrot and give up. In the end, if you make a change and the number of subscriptions increases, then it was a good change. Personally I’ve never heard of an MMO player who decides not to play MMO’s any more because of the farmers or the power levelers. More often its just because of boredom or not having the time to keep up with things in-game.
But EVE escapes some of the negative impacts of RMT due to nothing being permanent. So say someone with limited time blows a ton of RL money and buys a Carrier. Sure it’s a powerful ship, but they can lose that easily enough playing stupid.
In WoW if I pay for a maxed out character, I can go on into a battleground and play stupid forever, being more powerful than most characters. No amount of stupid play in a BG will ever diminish the huge boost spending that money and getting that character gave me. Buying anything in WoW is permanent (until the next expansion anyway) and hence has a huge impact.
Again though, I limit my complaint of RMT to games not designed for it. Whether RMT is the future model of all MMO’s or not is another topic.
Ahhh, that’s a really good point. Everything in Eve is expendable and conversely everything in Eve is usefull so the guy who only has a small tech one ship can still impact the game in a significant way. Eve also has the advantage that you can’t speed up skill training no matter how much money you have or how much time you spend playing each day. In WoW I understand you are kinda limited unless you don’t have a maxed character, and getting maxed out isn’t easy unless you have 40 hours per week to play. So, you could make a claim that the RMT companies are providing a service and that it’s the design of the game that is at fault? I wouldn’t agree with that point of view but technically you could argue that point. After all, Eve is a seriously competitive MMO but the negative effects of RMT are minimized by good design. As long as there is a demand for RMT and people willing to pay RL money for VR items and services won’t there always be someone trying to provide it? If so, since there’s always going to be someone doing RMT, shouldn’t you design games so that RMT doesn’t hurt the players too much? I’m not saying you should, I’m just doing a thought experiment. This line of thought is starting to sound like the argument to legalize pot in the US. “Since you can’t stop it, legalize it and tax it, no matter what the negative concequences might be”. Personally I’m against RMT, but when I play an MMO I’m kinda a purist. I don’t play alts or multiple accounts with specialized professions. I really like the RPG part of the MMORPG, and when you use green-backs to purchase a magic potion it takes all the fun out of it. Unfortunately, I think there’s a growing number of MMORGP players who don’t know what an RPG is or have never played one. They are people who grew up playing Mario and Street Fighter. They want instant gratification, not a pure RPG experience. Maybe the solution for a company like Blizzard is to reserve certain servers for the ‘real RPG’ players and focus their resources on those servers when it comes to limiting or mitigating the effects of RMT? I honestly don’t know where things are going but the results of all the law suits in progress right now will be very telling. The criminal suit filed by the state of Florida is more interresting to me than the one filed by Blizzard though.
When it comes to RMT in WoW I think it would be nearly impossible to correct it anymore than it is. The groups of players that either benefite or lose out from a change in RMT are way too huge and there are too many complications to consider.
I haven’t personally played EVE, but with it’s items not being permament you would expect a much different economy, no? The game structures for these games are too different to be comparable anyway, IMO.
In WoW dying costs you durability; not a very huge setback considering how easy it is to grind your repair costs. In EVE it seems you would lose a lot more upon defeat; if they implemented this kind of feature into WoW it may balance out the RMT a bit but I think they would lose a lot of subscribers. I used to play Eternal Lands, a 2.5-D (crappy 3-d), click-to-move, free, MMORPG. It was fantasy-based and had similar classes, professions to WoW. However, when you die in EL you get teleported to Hell; A huge “dungeon” with a very unclear map, you are always ported to a random spot, and the way to rez is finding the path out of Hell (which can take quite awhile). Also everything in your bag has a 10% or so chance of disappearing upon your death.
I think if WoW introduced something like this, some of the RMT issues would balance out, but I couldnt see 10 million ppl paying for their subs if they keep losing their badges of justice to some damn warp-chaser you swear wasn’t there 2 secs ago.
oh and btw Swift The U.S. SHOULD LEGALIZE POT! Not for me, but for the people who cannot live a regular life on a day-to-day basis without it. Some people have children and their disabilities wouldn’t allow them to be half the parent that they are without marijuana. These people shouldnt be forced to creep the backstreets, paranoid of being thrown in jail for trying to make their children’s lives better. Legalize medicinal marijuana.
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