f13.net

Speaking of RMT,

SOE sold to Zapak Digital of India an RMT company.

Zapak Digital entertainment, the online gaming company promoted by Anil Ambani-led ADAG group, is all set to buy out Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) for around $300 million (Rs 1,200 crore). Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...ow/2643807.cms (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Zapak_set_to_buy_out_Sony_Online_for_300_mn/articleshow/2643807.cms)

Bye bye SOE? Yet another company outsourced to India? Bye bye SOE Fan Faires?

But Smedley denies it: here (http://www.eq2flames.com/general-gameplay/17217-may-explain-few-things.html#post382432) and here (http://www.massively.com/2007/12/23/john-smedley-sony-online-is-not-getting-purchased-by-zapak/)

The plot thickens

1) Botting sucks. If I want to go kill a particular group of mobs, for whatever reason, and there's a bot there, for whatever reason, that bot is cutting into my fun. "Go hunt somewhere else" is not a valid rejoinder in this case. Fuck you, I'm the one who's actually logged in and playing the game. The fucking bot should be banned instead.

2) Spamming sucks. I don't care how boring and troublesome it is for some people to actually be bothered to play the game. If you're bored, fucking log out and/or quit. If you respond to any form of advertisements, whether in the game or outside of it, you're partially responsible for spam. Stop it.

3) Raph is a big fucking crybaby for making that post. Oh boo hoo hoo, look at all of these mechanisms we put into the game to make it easier for players to get together and socialize and help each other out. Well boo hoo to you too, Beardy McBeardison. How about the mechanisms you put into the game to make sure that players stick around and subscribe for months or years? If reaching the level cap takes someone X months of pointless grinding against the same four quest patterns and the same two dozen art assets, of course they're going to get bored and, at some point, try to circumvent the system. Especially if they're trying to catch up to their friends, with whom they can't meaningfully adventure (without twinking or powerlevelling) because they've been at the level cap for Y months already. Make a game without a hamster wheel for once.

3 continued) Your business model encourages RMT through the deliberately designed pervasive time sinks. And now you're all like, "hey the developers and publishers should be getting in on that sweet sweet RMT candy. It's only fair." Shenanigans. Make a game that doesn't have time sinks, and you'll have a game where people have nothing to trade their RM for.

Of course, to make such a game, you'd need to come up with something for players to do that will keep them engaged for longer than a few weeks. I hear that coming up with content is one of the more time consuming aspects of game development. No wonder you're taking the easy way out.


(edit: grammatical fix)

It causes inflation. Prices on newbie/mid level items go up faster than a real newbie/mid leveler can afford if they don't buy gold.

1)  How is the bot cutting into your fun?  There is no difference in a bot killing 'your' mobs (that you don't own) than a player that just wants to be a dick about things.  You can report the bot for being a bot, but you can't report the player for just being a dick and taking over your kill zone.

Speaking of RMT,

SOE sold to Zapak Digital of India an RMT company.

In fact, when I buy ISK/gold/plat whatever I'm feeding a poor asian kid somewhere. In Eve, I actually defend Asian farmers I like, and kill the others. Ni hao bitches.

It causes inflation. Prices on newbie/mid level items go up faster than a real newbie/mid leveler can afford if they don't buy gold.

Many of them use stolen credit cards, obtained by unsuspecting users who give them credit card #'s to purchase in-game gold. I'm not saying all of the RMT shops out there use stolen credit cards, but a LOT of them do. Your credit card is absolutely not safe in their hands.

In addition we recieve large scale (over $500k so far) fines for chargebacks that these scumbag farmers routinely do. They purchase a new account.. use it for a month and then call the credit card company to say "I never paid for this". Over time, as the # of these incidents rise we get fined by the credit card companies. And it's not just us, other large MMO companies are seeing exactly the same problem.

According to Craig Schmugar, a researcher with the McAfee research labs, McAfee now sees more password-stealing malware designed to nab accounts of games like Lineage and World of Warcraft than Trojans that go after financial accounts.

Your bank account is still a juicy target, of course, and the single most common variety of password-stealer is still the ‘Banker’ variety. But for total numbers the game-breakers are more numerous. Aside from WoW and Lineage, Legend of Mir accounts are a big target.

Schmugar has a couple of ideas about why virtual gold might have such a strong lure. Most importantly, there’s less risk of serious consequences for someone who steals World of Warcraft accounts than for someone caught stealing bank logins, for instance.

But it can be just as easy to convert that game gold into real money by way of the thriving game-currency selling sites online. Many sought-after game items, just bits of code and pixels, can fetch a good price as well.

Of course, no one has ever questioned whether real capital gains from economic activity in virtual worlds is taxable. Thus, if a player makes a real profit by buying and selling digital goods such as weapons, buildings, vehicles and the like, they must, under the law, declare the income.

The bigger and so far, unanswered question, has been whether economic gain that is stored in virtual currencies and property is taxable. And that appears to be what Congress may be looking at.

The bot cuts into my fun by competing for mob spawns. Just like a player would. The difference is that the player is playing the game. The bot shouldn't be there, and if he's not there, there's more room not only for me, but for the other live player(s) as well. The live meat person pressing keys might be a dick, but the person who buys a bot program and has it play the game for him is automatically a dick.

If you're bored, fucking log out and/or quit. If you respond to any form of advertisements, whether in the game or outside of it, you're partially responsible for spam. Stop it.

Oh boo hoo hoo, look at all of these mechanisms we put into the game to make it easier for players to get together and socialize and help each other out. Well boo hoo to you too, Beardy McBeardison.

How about the mechanisms you put into the game to make sure that players stick around and subscribe for months or years? If reaching the level cap takes someone X months of pointless grinding against the same four quest patterns and the same two dozen art assets, of course they're going to get bored and, at some point, try to circumvent the system.

1)  How is the bot cutting into your fun?  There is no difference in a bot killing 'your' mobs (that you don't own) than a player that just wants to be a dick about things.

Oh boo hoo hoo, look at all of these mechanisms we put into the game to make it harder for players to get together and socialize and help each other out.

Fixed that for you.

All the countermeasures against RMT (and for that matter, against everything Darniaq listed) have demonstrably made it much much HARDER to get together and socialize. Surely everyone can agree on that?

All the countermeasures against RMT (and for that matter, against everything Darniaq listed) have demonstrably made it much much HARDER to get together and socialize. Surely everyone can agree on that?

The MMO aspect seem to have very little to do with socializing, and much more with waving the e-peen in front of sea of strangers. The bigger, the better.

So did instancing, shift of design paradigm to focus on ability of people to solo their way to the 'end of game' and --ironically enough-- the social tools like guilds which wind up as convenient mechanics to avoid everyone who's not part of guild. I'm just not sure if i'll agree with you that "the point of MMO" is to make people socialize first and foremost and as much as possible. Certainly not if the players themselves are any indication, as the tendency in last few years appears to be, people want to play these games while socializing as little as possible. The MMO aspect seem to have very little to do with socializing, and much more with waving the e-peen in front of sea of strangers. The bigger, the better.

I am sorry to say this, but the developers have created the RMT market due to poor game design. Last year I wrote an article about MMORPG’s (http://www.lotd.org/index.php?page=31), and reiterated that the current design isn’t friendly to the average PC gamer. There are too many time based barriers that prevent people from being able to game with their friends. That lead me to write another article about making guild friendly games (http://www.lotd.org/index.php?page=63). Both of these articles are extremely popular at Guildcafe.com, and Guildcafe now has close to 60,000 members. I’ll also point out that I’m the most famous person there..p.

Anyway dealing just with RMT and not the other barriers, it basically boils down to a couple of things. The first thing is that in most games you gain money by sitting there mindlessly bashing mobs, mindlessly crafting, or mindlessly running delivery type quests. That is boring as hell, and it takes up a lot of someone’s time. Your average PC gamer (30 years old) has 1-3 hours per day to play your game, and they don’t want to spend 2 hours of it doing boring things.

Too many games have made someone’s virtual worth all about the gear they wear. So people who don’t have the right gear don’t get in the fun groups. In order to get that gear, they need real or virtual money to outright buy it or in-game money to craft it. Once they have their phat lewt, they get in the good groups. So the guy who has the money but not the time is going going to buy what he needs so he can skip through the boring stuff, and get to the good stuff.

This also goes into the RMT for powerleveling services. I have paid for powerleveling services in two games in recent years because I simply don’t have the time to slosh through the boring stuff, and I can’t keep up with my friends who can play more than me. So I can be left behind and quit the game, or I can pay someone to level me so I can keep playing with my friends. Most games force you to quit or pay for powerleveling because their grouping mechanics penalize higher level people from doing anything with lower level people.

CoH has a sidekick program that’s cool, but it sucks for helping lower level people catch up with the higher level people. Also if you get too far from your higher level mentor you become a newbie again and die easily. The lower level guy brings nothing to the group because he’s only got access to his low level powers, and thus the brilliant idea ultimately fails.

The other side of this is guild based advancement. Many guilds need to have a lot of things to offer their members in order to attract and retain new recruits. Therefore they are willing to buy resources they need to craft things, develop a cool guild house, or even buy Powerleveled characters that are specifically tailored to help the guild achieve PVE or PVP goals.

IMHO if developers want to crush external RMT services, then they need to be willing to offer the same type of service. People are always going to be crunched for time and willing to buy premade characters, uber items, gold, etc. You will never crush the external market so long as games are stuck in a “massive time spent = game advancement” model.

Or developers could simply have a system that lets people powerlevel their friends easily, have good item drops as a standard part of the game, develop a flat leveling curve so that after a certain point levels don’t matter a whole lot while speeding up advancement to that point, make a solo game more viable with missions that can be done in 60 minutes or less, and giving guilds the tools they need to actually help their membership.

But otherwise sitting here crying about RMT is stupid because it is a direct result of poor game design that doesn’t fit the profile of a 30 year old gamer with a professional career, real life responsibilities, and money to burn so he can bypass all the bullshit you find in today’s game design.

It causes inflation. Prices on newbie/mid level items go up faster than a real newbie/mid leveler can afford if they don't buy gold.

RMT does create bad behavior. Farmers...

Whether or not it actually delivers l33tdom to players, this is what RMT participants think they are getting.

3. Those fuckers are using keyloggers, trojans and other nasty things that normal computer users are not aware.

But I think most people still treat WOW and other games as basically the bar they go to hang out at.

And Geldon, you're niave if you think advertising would go down without RMTing. Like I said above, visit any commerce center. There's virtually no actual RMT advertising, and yet you can barely keep up with what's being barked. You ever stand in Coronet Starport pre-CU? In EC tunnel before Luclin? Ironforge? Bree?

In more recent games, random tells and random party invites have risen, but those are a joke. Add to the /ignore list. If adding someone to ignore is a problem for you (in general, not just you personally), then you're either very tolerant of everything but RMTing, or you don't run into other people often :-)

What the hell does RMT advertising have to do with advertising legitimate in-game services and goods (such as a Coronet doctor advertising he can buff people).  Don't call me naive if you're blathering this shit.

But I think most people still treat WOW and other games as basically the bar they go to hang out at.

But then the ability to echange gear/money with other player or lack thereof doesn't actually affect such casual bar-like interaction. For that matter you probably don't need large parts of what's typically put in MMO to get the 'virtual bar to hang out at', and the desired functionality can be pretty much duplicated by any single player or small multi-player game paired with chat server. Or in some cases by chat server alone. So dramatic hyperboles how removal of option to trade goods might as well mean the game should be devoid of any ability to interact whatsoever... it sort of falls flat and short of making the point.

Rather, I consider them more like Off Track Betting places, casinos, or even bowling alleys.

And for the emotionally-charged out there, consider the actual impact of RMT versus the supposed and theoretical. Then find some people who don't live these games day and night, but who play them occasionally, and ask them what they think (and not in a "do you like to achieve how the game was intended or do you support the rampant cheating of exploiters and bots?" sorta way :wink:). You might be surprised what the "Average person" thinks.

But then the ability to echange gear/money with other player or lack thereof doesn't actually affect such casual bar-like interaction. For that matter you probably don't need large parts of what's typically put in MMO to get the 'virtual bar to hang out at', and the desired functionality can be pretty much duplicated by any single player or small multi-player game paired with chat server. Or in some cases by chat server alone. So dramatic hyperboles how removal of option to trade goods might as well mean the game should be devoid of any ability to interact whatsoever... it sort of falls flat and short of making the point.

I can only assume that these jackanapes spend thousands and thousands of dollars a day on WoW accounts for spam purposes.

Tell me why RMT is any different from...

• Powerleveling
• Twinking
• Dual-boxing
• Logging in at server-up
• Bots of any type
• Joining a fresh server before others
• Getting into a game before launch

Or is there some fundamental measurable objective impact it has on the game world?

Nope. They use free trial accounts. Which means that more and more abilities are taken away from free trials as spambots abuse them. The latest to go was spamming group invites; now spambots are limited to standing in the middle of Orgimmar spamming ads all day (or until someone reports them for spamming).

This also means that legitimate free trial users can no longer make their own groups.

To Blizzard's credit, they have done more than most in addressing the symptoms of RMT spam; it's far less spam-infested than, say, 3 months ago.

Great thoughts all!


Farming causes inflation. Farming is the "bad" behavior. RMTing is just one transaction to help move the gold around. Remove the need to farm, or place the major rewards behind other gates.

Why are we having this argument again pretending that there's even a discussion here ?

Two Sides :  Those who use it and those who don't.

Hrm. I seem to remember gettings spam invites after the Blizz crackdown on trial accounts. Then again, it wouldn't be the first time I've had "creative memory".  :uhrr:

The Simond method of fixing RMT: Ban the buyers, not the sellers. The goldsellers seem to be perfectly willing to keep...acquiring accounts - I suspect that the people forking over RL cash for e-gold won't be quite so willing.

At least, after the first couple of accounts.

I couldn't care less about RMT. Go for broke, I say.

If it seems to be harming the game, then fix the root causes. The RMT is just highlighting issues if it becomes an issue, it's not an issue of itself.

Issue!

So, am I wrong? Is RMTing just another method of gaming the game like the others listed, all to get around problems and keep up with friends or get ahead at all? Or is there some fundamental measurable objective impact it has on the game world?

The social pressure from having a group of friends that you level with would be very different if you don't have those friends. People use RMT to catch up, but the flip side is also true -- you wouldn't use it if it meant levelling past your friends -- and if they are not RMTers, they will look down on you for doing it anyway.

If you are just soloing, then you don't care who you outlevel. I'd guess you are a bit more likely to do it.

IainC proposes something interesting, but of course it would take dollars and manpower. If you had a parsed log of all trades, then could sort by biggest trade of gold or most number of trades over a certain amt...you might be on to something there.

Banning buyers is the only way to remove demand, and removing demand is the only way to get rid of a market entirely, regardless of how many regulations one places in the way of it.  See: Prohibition, War on Drugs, black market gun, drug (prescription kind), organ, slave, and anything else you can think of trade.  Markets can be driven underground but never slain so long as someone is willing to pay enough to make a profit for the people doing the selling.

So as someone who doesn't use it but doesn't care about it anways, I fit in what side?

I don't care about people advertising to sell in-game stuff for in-game stuff.  I care about people advertising about out-of-game stuff.  It's an immersion breaker, but not only that, it's also annoying because I prefer people progress by playing the game instead of paying real money to the people that rape it.

• Logging in at server-up

Eh? What now? Don't really understand you.

• Getting into a game before launch

Que?

* better left for after the holidays *

Retarded or can't you read ?

What’s driving RMT is comparative advantage. Some people have a lot of real world money, and very little time to acquire stuff in the game. Others have little real world money, and lots of time. So they trade, my time for your money. Break that imbalance, and you break the spring that drives RMT.

It does if you are competing with farmers to acquire limited resources.

The "farming" argument is bullshit. Players or bots farm the most efficient X/hour no matter what X is. If a bot isn't doing it, a real person is. What's the difference to me? Nothing.

Suppose that I can get real dollars for the X that I am farming using a bot, and that it significantly exceeds the cost of operating the bot. Would you as a player be happy if I ran so many bots that the only place you could get your X was by buying it from me?

The first case, for me, is not a problem because of farming or RMT but botting.

Quadruple ditto to whomever has pointed out that if you bitches would stop playing games where you can't kill other people this wouldn't even be a damn issue.

Banning customers of RMT is normally over harsh. In general the fact that you've deleted something they've paid real money for is enough punishment. Backed up with the slap on the wrist when you send them the CS email, this generally ensures that they understand they did something wrong and that they have suffered the consequences for that. Like the vast majority of people who get caught cheating, once they understand that they will get caught and they will be punished, they generally stop doing it. Plus they tell their friends (http://forums.freddyshouse.com/general-discussion18/67532-goa-rampage.html) that they got caught and this further impacts on the RMT businesses. In general the only people you should be banning in relation to RMT are the operators. It might be within the remit of the ToS to ban users but it's rarely warranted.

Yeah, I was replying to some post saying that there was no difference between botted and player actions.

The commander rune called.  It wanted you to know that you're all kinds of wrong here.

The "farming" argument is bullshit. Players or bots farm the most efficient X/hour no matter what X is. If a bot isn't doing it, a real person is. What's the difference to me? Nothing.

The commander rune called.  It wanted you to know that you're all kinds of wrong here.

Umm no I'm not?

Not once in the 5 months of nonstop SB I played from launch on did I hear fucking dick about RMT.  Too busy killing people.  I'll believe you if you said it existed but it had zero impact on my game experience.  If I wanted a rune I got a posse together and killed anybody else who was trying to get it.  Also I knew at least one solo thief who got several of the high priced runes including commander regularly to give to the nation or sell.

People farm without RMT.  However, it's pretty obvious that RMT jacks up the intensity of farming about 1,000%.  If I am camping the Frenzied Ghoul for a FBSS in 2001 Guk, I'm camping because I want the item for my little virtual dude or I want some plat to buy something else for my little virtual dude.  If I don't get it, I'll be bummed, but it won't really be that big a deal.  I also don't want to destroy my reputation, because I need my reputation to get groups, and I need groups to get other things for my little virtual dude.

If, on the other hand, I am camping Guk for money I need to eat and pay my rent so I don't get thrown out on the fucking street I'm going to farm much, much, much more aggressively and I am going to care a whole lot less about other people. And I'll be there all day every day. And I'll hire other people to do it too.

Sometimes differences in degree matter.  Sure, some people care too much about shit in these games.  But a lot more people get a lot more crazy over actual cash.

If you are just soloing, then you don't care who you outlevel.

I'd say that these games are pretty immoral actually.

It's still predictable, and can be treated as a simple expense.  They may even have maps that show how often they're killed per day for different regions.  With color codes and stuff.  They also fly ships that are much cheaper than their profit margins; typically you're getting a load of ore, the odd industrial, or the odd osprey - that's nothing.

We had a few GMs warn us a few times for cross-teaming in Azshara the first couple months WOW was out. Before they fixed the drop rates on those bird creatures. We'd jump on ventrilo with a 'friendly enemy' guild who was playing alliance, and we'd give the locations of each others farmers and just grief the hell out of them. It was pretty fun.

Explain?

Sounds like PvP games should allow RMT and let the players police it. It's free content.

They fail to deliver teh "fun".

If there was a surefire way to tell the farmers from the n00bs who just don't know any better, I am all for it. Killing a bot farmer would make my day.

PVE MMOs are mostly a very passive-aggressive form of competition. This should be beyond obvious to anyone who either plays them or reads forums.

Even if they aren't a farmer, I say kill them for having a farmer name anyways! :)

There are games in which RMT is allowed.
There are games in which they have RMT servers and NON-RMT servers.
Yet you do not play those games or on those servers? RMT is still huge in EQ2 despite the exchange servers... Why?

Because, RMT is cheating. It's the same reason there isn't a "Steroid" league in baseball. The cheaters don't want to play against other cheaters. They want an unfair advantage against non-cheaters. Simple as that.

It's just sad that people can convince themselves otherwise.

What an incredibly sad commentary on the state of the genre...

Because, RMT is cheating.

its cheating because the license agreement says not to do it.

i.e. its cheating because its against the rules and increases your advantage in the game.  it can be a completely arbitrary and useless rule, but when you break it to get better, you're cheating.

if you have any other questions, ask merriam or webster.

Now say that the encounter which drops this popular item is permacamped and farmed by RMT operators. THey control the supply of that item so they can charge what they like for it.

Explain?

Mob genocide, for one. We're mercenaries, killing for money. We don't think about it that way so don't really care all that much about it. But grab someone off the street who's not a gamer (and which would still make up the majority of the world's population) and watch their reaction to you roaming the virtual countryside killing everything in your path for nothing more than personal gain.

Is harassing someone "cheating"?  Using a copyrighted name for your character?  Those are against the TOS too.

I don't think your Merriam Webster definition is as black and white as you seem to think.  Those things are forbidden but not covered by the term "cheating".

Shit, that would be great. Not depressing at all. I've always wanted to play a bard.... And actually do bard stuff.

...except in EVE, where every ship lost is a bite taken out of their profit margins.

They sell ISK. Ships cost ISK to buy and fit. Insurance, at best, covers somewhere in the region of 2/3rds of the total cost of a ship (including fittings). Every ship lost is 1/3rd of that ship's price of ISK gone that they could have otherwise sold.

It's not that easy. Killing farmers in EVE is actually counterproductive because insurance payouts are one huge money faucet.

A farmer buys a Raven for 90 mio ISK, insures it, equips it and goes ratting. The Raven and the equipment was produced from materials that were gathered by miners. Nanoganker_01 pops the farmer's Raven, the farmer gets a 70 mio ISK insurance payout. So while the farmer has lost stuff worth something like 150 mio ISK, no ISK has left the economy because it took no ISK to produce that stuff in the first place. Instead, the insurance mechanic has added another 70 mio ISK into economy. And that's more ISK than the farmer would have pumped into the economy in the time that he lost from getting killed and having to buy and equip a new ship.

So while you're harming the individual farmer, you're harming the economy as well. The farmer won't be impressed... the time and ISK loss associated with getting killed is simply part of the cost of doing business. And professional farming operations likely have production facilities for Ravens and mining barges and such, so all it takes them to recoup their losses is a minor cut from the minerals they auto-macroed with their 1000 mining bots.

It's even worse when killing macro-miners. Unlike ratters and mission runners, they don't add ISK to the economy at all... but when you kill them, ISK is added to the system via insurance payouts. Killing farmers just doesn't seem particularly helpful... the economic impact of doing so is probably every bit as bad as just letting them be. So why be mean to little yellow people if it doesn't solve the problem?

Umm. Not really.
Firstly the insurance payout even for platinum levels is less than the materials cost of the hull plus the cost of insuring. Otherwise it would be possible to become very rich by committing serial insurance fraud and the economy would implode. Secondly the insurance payout doesn't include the cost of any modules or rigs fitted, nor the cost of the pilot's clone. So the farmer gets 70m (or whatever) Isk as a direct result of you pwning his Covetor, then has to take >70m Isk worth of farmed ore, insurance and fittings to get back to where he was before Battlefleet Billy turned up. If you leave him alone 100% of his output gets turned into Isk and sold on. If you don't then 100% of his payout minus the differential between the insurance payouts and his losses gets turned over. I fail to see how he's better off in the secons scenario.

Read my posting again, please. I'm talking about the amount of ISK in circulation. No ISK is needed to build a Raven, hence no ISK is removed by destroying it but ISK is added into circulation from the insurance payout. I'm talking about the macro-economic effect here, not about the individual farmers wallet. Every time there is an insurance payout, the amount of ISK in circulation is increased because destroying a ship does not remove ISK from the economy, only the minerals that were transformed into the ship.

But those minerals are the same as ISK and they have been removed from the economy. Some Isk has been added, somewhat more potential Isk has been removed. Net result is that the economy has not grown, it only grows when 'free' money is added from mining, looting, ratting or missions. Insurance money isn't free cash, it's been paid for already.

No, it's not the same as ISK. Minerals aren't "potential" ISK since they cannot be transformed into ISK. They can be transformed into ships and guns and warp disruptors that can be sold to other players for ISK but there is a difference between money changing hands and money entering the economy.

Anytime the game gives you something that you haven't paid for, the economy grows. If you mine materials, then the economy grows, those minerals didn't exist before and you can swap them for an amount of Isk or items. Essentially then they are Isk and they are free to you, the miner. The Isk that players pay you for them was already in circulation and doesn't magically pop into existence when you sell those materials but adding those materials to the market grows the economy. When you're talking about fluid assets like minerals, ships, modules etc (pretty much anything can be considered fluid as long as there is any kind of demand for it) then stuff=money. Additionally as a result of blowing up the ship, Isk leaves the system in the form of destroyed modules/ammo/cargo, clone payments, insurance costs and any discrepancy between the payout and the cost of building a new ship.

its cheating because the license agreement says not to do it.

i.e. its cheating because its against the rules and increases your advantage in the game.  it can be a completely arbitrary and useless rule, but when you break it to get better, you're cheating.

if you have any other questions, ask merriam or webster.

Again, why do you care?

Again, why do you care?

How's it cheating exactly?  If I find grinding mobs boring, why do you care if pay someone else to do it or macro it?

How's it cheating exactly?  If I find grinding mobs boring, why do you care if pay someone else to do it or macro it?

Again, why do you care?

The playing field has never been equal and never can be.  Terms like"cheaters" & "losers" suit the same type of person who demands class x is nerfed and hates school kids because they have more time to play.

Never paid for leveling, items or in-game money myself but I have zero problems with those who do.

Again, why do you care?

Most MMOs are not like this.

Yes, but the biggest one is, accounting for a big percentage of the market. WoW is only one game, but it arguably represents 70-75% or more of all Western MMO players ("arguably" because there's only reported sub numbers to go by).

The only thing $200 worth of gold is going to buy you at the endgame is the Epic Flying skill. Otherwise, the only gear upgrades, either from PvE or PvP, are BoP drops, or BoPs purchased with different currency you can't buy (Honor Points, various Marks, Arena Points). These are all anti-RMT tactics (some of which also appear in other games, including earlier ones).

Except you can very well buy Arena points, Also a fair number of 'high-end' guilds will offer to sell various drops from bosses they continue to farm weekly. So your $200 worth of gold can go alot further then you think.

To me, buying arena points for gold smacks more of cheating than buying gold.  It's the primary/secondary thing.  Arena points ARE the measure by which you "win" a certain part of the game.  People compare arena rankings.  No one compares gold amounts (that I'm aware of).

Buying gold is still secondary, because you have to buy the gold then IN TURN buy the arena points, BOE purples, whatever.  And BOE purples are a means to an end in themselves, actually, determining what you can take on PvE wise.  So buying gold is two steps removed.

your or anyone else's opinion on it has nothing to do with the fact that it is, in fact, cheating.  Seriously, I love people who RMT, and I've worked with chinese farmer bosses, but it's pretty damn retarded to try to say it's not cheating.  I'm not sure why I'm even responding to you again.

So by that measure taking steroids in baseball isn't that big a deal because your team doesn't get ranked by muscle mass.

I can't help but agree with that.  By the definition I'm thinking of, steroids isn't directly cheating at any particular match. It is, of course, against the rules just like buying gold in those non RMT games.

But if the rules are set up to prevent artificial enhancement of player's inherent abilities, then if one participates in competition while under influence of such enhancement... they are in fact cheating: because cheating is 'an act of lying, deception, fraud, trickery, imposture, or imposition' and they are lying they're clean by very act of entering the competition in such state (as being clean is  pre-requisite to compete, defined by the rules)

Ok, I'll need some edumacation here. how does one buy Arena points? Do they pay their opponents to lose? Or is there a mechanism for transferring the point?

On raid drops, yea there's those who rent slots to tag-alongs who want the BoP drops. But you shouldn't bother with cash on the BoE stuff. And for those that do either or both, well, that's right back at he other half of this "problem": there being buyers for he stuff.

But neither transaction do I see as harmful to others per se. People get cut out of teams and raids all the time, for many reasons. This probably is not am epidemic. And I think it important to note the impact of these events individually and collectively. Right now I see a bunch of isolated events that only alienate players slightly differently than the core game mechanics do by default.

But see, this is an example of the very dilution of terminology I'm arguing against.  That would expand the term to lying about nearly anything game-related (your raid experience in another guild for example).

And what about someone who is forthright with the fact that they bought gold.  Are they now no longer cheating?

No, it's not the same as ISK. Minerals aren't "potential" ISK since they cannot be transformed into ISK. They can be transformed into ships and guns and warp disruptors that can be sold to other players for ISK but there is a difference between money changing hands and money entering the economy.

Edit:
When you're adding ISK to the system while removing goods (like minerals), you're getting an inflationary pressure. More money + less goods = higher prices.

Not increasing the monetary supply (by not killing the macro miner and causing ISK to poof into existence via insurance payouts) while adding more goods to the economy (by letting the macro miner live to sell his stuff) results in lower prices, which directly translates into increased real income for everyone participating in the economy. Like in real life, lower prices = good. Especially since the drawbacks of deflation shouldn't be a problem in synthetic economies in which goods leave the economy like they do in EVE (and unlike EQ back in 1999/2000).

And once it's known you are breaking the game rules you're likely to be banned for it, so "being forthright" is either being dumb if it's done in such manner, or it's being dishonest about this whole 'being forthright' thing when one is only being forthright about it only with selected people, to avoid the punishment/ban that they know would otherwise happen.

And what about someone who is forthright with the fact that they bought gold.  Are they now no longer cheating?

You still didn't address my issue.  Dumb or not, you could be forthright about it and you'd be just as wrong, IMO, as if you had bought it and never told a soul.  In fact, you just introduced a paradox, because if the dishonesty is the issue, then ratting yourself out clears you of the charges.  :-)

I made lots of ISK off players who thought like you.  *Everything* is ISK, at either a discount or premium depending on location.  I'd find stuff that was priced under the salvage value, and behind it was always somebody who thought minerals were free because they'd mined them themselves.  Sacrificing BS's for the insurance payout sometimes made sense in deep 0.0 (where the risks of bulk haulage to empire markets discounted them way under the default values).  But they'd do this in 0.5+ systems.

I think you misunderstand what I'm talking about. I'm talking about monetary supply and inflation in EVE's synthetic economy and how insurance payouts add to that, which leads to the paradoxical situation that killing farmers because they hurt the economy is actually every bit as hurtful (if not even more so) than letting them do their thing.

I'm not sure how often I have to explain the concept for you guys to understand. Yes, the farmer might lose stuff that takes him 150 mio ISK to replace. But these 150 mio ISK aren't removed from the economy, they simply change hands to the producer of the new ship and equipment. The insurance payout, though, poofs 70 mio ISK into existence that didn't exist before.

Yes, the farmer took a loss, but at the same time, the economy as a whole just suffered from the creation of an additional 70 mio ISK that didn't exist before and which amounts to more than the farmer could have pumped into the economy within the time span it took him to replace the ship. Killing farmers means removing minerals from the economy (i.e. ships and crap) while adding ISK. Less minerals and more ISK in the system lead to inflation. Killing farmers, especially macro-miners, is extremely counter-productive with regard to the economic health of the in-game economy and doesn't do jack shit to reduce the Chinaman farmer scourge (hint: they won't go away as long as there is money to be made).

To expand a little on what Typhon said, it's not so much 'you' in the singular, personal sense but the wider ramifications of that becoming a widespread and accepted practice. 'You' are becoming part of the problem in a small and likely unquantifiable way, but you aren't, in yourself, The Enemy. It's like the difference between saying 'Why do you care if I happen to keep ebola cultures?' and ebola cultures being available to all and sundry*. It's looking beyond the personal impact and looking at the larger issues that it presents to the game dynamics and the community.


*For the hard of reading, I am not in anyway suggesting that buying gold is akin to deliberately spreading ebola....

Ok, I'll need some edumacation here. how does one buy Arena points? Do they pay their opponents to lose? Or is there a mechanism for transferring the point?

On raid drops, yea there's those who rent slots to tag-alongs who want the BoP drops. But you shouldn't bother with cash on the BoE stuff. And for those that do either or both, well, that's right back at he other half of this "problem": there being buyers for he stuff.

But neither transaction do I see as harmful to others per se. People get cut out of teams and raids all the time, for many reasons. This probably is not am epidemic. And I think it important to note the impact of these events individually and collectively. Right now I see a bunch of isolated events that only alienate players slightly differently than the core game mechanics do by default.

No it isn't.

Firstly less than 70m isk is going to be added to the economy as a net effect of blowing up a ship with a 70m insurance payout. A decent portion of that is going to leave the system completely as I explained before.

Secondly, cash is added to the system all the time through various mechanisms. Taking the line that you shouldn't blow up ships you don't like because it will negatively impact the game economy is ludicrous. Eve's economy is pretty well balanced and has enough drains that it can stand constant injection of new Isk. I'm pretty sure it's not static but it's not galloping off at an uncontrollable rate either. The economy is also very large to the point where even a major alliance probably couldn't damage it in a meaningful way. Even if you waged a genocidal campaign and popped scores of macrominers a day, the overall impact on the economy is going to be tiny. Think of all the ships that get blown up daily and it's fairly clear that insurance payouts aren't destroying the economy.

I'd love to get that glowy eyes thing for my inquisitor...is it like CoH where it has a smokey trail off in particular colors or what?

I nailed down what's bothering me about this term.

The thing is, when I hear the term "cheating", I think of a direct, primary effect of gaining an advantage over another player.  Things like buying gold can give you (as a secondary effect) an advantage, but it's not an advantage in itself, unless the point of the game is to collect the most gold.

This is a tangent to the RMT subject, but I'll explain somewhat.  The arena points issue absolutely is directly harmful to others.

Allowing some untalented, unskilled noob to run around in epic armor on top of a flying mount of doom with a flaming sword just because he paid $11.99 trivializes their worth.

In EQ1, I played a Mage. When I saw another mage with his Epic Pet, I thought "Wow, that guy worked really hard for that. Camping hours and hours, killing all those raid mobs." I was truly impressed with his efforts. It made me want to play... more... and better.

If he could have simply bought the item for $50... it would devalue not only the item but the effort as well. It would make me not want to play the game because I would have no goals.

You, sir, are what's wrong with mmo.

No. That he saw that someone had camped for hours and hours killing mobs over and over and it inspired him. That's mental illness. Mmogtarded.

I agree with what you're saying for the most part. Leveling itself should be fun. From level 1 to level 105.

It took a non-gamer, Shi Yuzhu, an entrepreneur who made his first fortune marketing "vitamin tonic",

Has anyone seen this article? (http://playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1818-Gold-Farming-+-RMT-+-Power-Leveling-+-PvP-+-Gambling-The-Most-Popular-Game-in-China-ZT-Online.html)

See, I don't have any problem with a game like that.  It's designed from the ground up to take real money as part of the game play.  Players know exactly what they're getting into, and an informed choice can be made.  I certainly wouldn't play a game like that, but others might and more power to them.  The key point is:  Everyone knows that real money is part of your advancement right from the start, and it is part of the game's rules.

I don't get the impression that Raph (or anyone else in this thread) thinks that advancement driven by real money in an online game is bad in principle.  Real money trades become a thorny issue when affixed to an online game that is designed with and is advertised as in-game advancement for in-game rewards.  Think what you will of typical MMO mechanics, problems result when players subvert the mechanics of any game, be it Checkers or WoW.

Slot machines are social too. You're usually sitting next to someone on another machine.

"Social" is as vague as "fun". It can mean anything to anyone trying to make any point.