f13.net

http://stationblog.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/station-exchange-service-transition-to-live-gamer/

"We can't beat 'em!" (not actual quote)

I wonder how much of Live Gamer's activity contributed to SOE's problems. We will never know. The agreement to identify farmers and agree not to do business with farmers is hilarious. Live Gamer is going to make money by farming.

This seems like an admission that sanctioning RMT doesn't solve the problems/gameplay impacts of RMT, so why keep sanctioning it at all? SOE was taking a transaction fee before. Will they continue to do so?

They should have just cut the bullshit and gone directly to selling gold/ items.   The got kicked in the pants already by those of us against the exchange and other such things, it's not they would have generated any additional ill will.

It's my understanding that the Station Exchange works as a kind of eBay / auction house. Is that correct?

Because, if that's true, I completely understand why such a system has done nothing to discourage farming.

You are correct on both counts.  It was a silly system whose obvious intent was to skim off the old player auctions site.. without the realization as to what drove that.

Having read the article, it makes perfect sense that the Exchange saw complaints about RMT spam drop off, because they provided an officially sanctioned channel where external RMTers could sell their wares without resorting to spamming in-game channels to get business. And since RMT spam is what most players hate, it seemed like the issue went away.

But funnily enough, it seems that external RMTers use things like credit card fraud to get around paying for things and that farming for items to profit off continues unabated. And if LiveGamer doesn't deal with 'famers' (yeah, good luck with that) then the external RMTers will just go back to spamming in-game channels to make their sales (assuming they don't just churn and burn accounts as they need them to get around any LiveGamer restrictions).

I'll keep saying this until it gets through: the only way to drive external RMT out of a MMO is to offer an officially sanctioned RMT channel that sells in-game currency, levels and probably items at fixed prices. Theoretically farmers have to spend time earning these things, while the devs could just create them infinitely. Provided the devs can squash all dupe bugs that could give farmers the same benefits, if you make it cost-prohibitive for external RMTers to operate (i.e. undercut their prices) they'll get out of the game.

Will this impact on your in-game economy? Of course. But the MMO gets more money and the negative factors of external RMT get removed. That's a fair trade imo.

Well, it did very little to stop the torrent of spam on other servers. The problem is that people don't want the right to buy gold or whatever, they want to buy gold or whatever in games where it's not allowed.

I don't understand how this move is going to cut down on farming.

It's not.

Real genius doesn't need to be explained.

Translation: OMG we lost money hand over foot and we're dumping this, who'd ever have thought people who cheat at games would use fake credit cards or charge back purchases to do it?!

Yeah it doesn't cut down on farming at all.. but that's not why they're doing it.  Seems more like they're looking to push the burden of dealing with all the credit card fraud on to another company.  With all that fraud the service probably wasn't making SOE money, so better to just push it onto someone else's lap than shut down the servers and say, "Well that was a failure!"

 Ed: Damn, num beat me to it.

This is probably just a case of outsourcing the expensive and money-sinky effort of keeping the service alive. Now it's not up to SOE to do it right, but some third party, a relationship they can "review" in time. I suspect the effort cost of Exchange was more than the effort cost of making whole new games.

The other thing to consider is just how much is going to be internalized to individual future SOE games, like The Agency.

As to truly combating RMT? Design a different type of game. How many RMTers are spamming the chat spaces in COD4?

I doubt SOE is done with RMT, in fact, I think they might just be begining.

This is probably mostly spin and a trial towards that end.

Consider:

Full Disclosure/disclaimer:  I work for a development company that has a publishing relationship with SOE.  I have no knowledge about this deal, or really the station exchange, outside of what I just read in the press release and the station exchange white paper.  The opinions expressed here to not represent the opinions of SOE or Flying Lab Software.  Yadda yadda yadda.

I love making games, I wouldn't work in the game industry if I didn't.  No one who works in this industry is in it for the money.  The vast majority of people in the industry could get a job outside of the industry and dramatically increase their salary.

That said we have bills to pay.  I make a conscious trade off: I make less money in order to enjoy going to work.  But I still have to make some money.  And, like everyone, I'm always going to want to make a little more.  In order for me to keep making my princely salary, my company has to turn a profit.  I would like to see my company turn a significant profit so I can make a little more money.

Whatever I feel about RMT, on a design level, is completely eclipsed by the threat of illicit RMT 'companies' to the profitability of the company I work for, and by extension my job, and my ability to pay the rent.  What you have to understand is that most RMT companies are criminal enterprises.  I don't mean that RMT is a crime (not a lawyer, don't really know), I mean most of the people who are engaged in this activity are criminals.  Their illegal credit card transactions cost the MMO industry a lot of money.  I mean A LOT of money.

That's what I care about.  That's what game developers and game publishers care about.  They care about it because it means peoples jobs.

RMT is going to happen.  All the banning and enforcement in the world is not going to stop that*.  Game developers have to make a conscious choice of how they are going to handle it.  Most companies have chosen to largely ignore it.  You ban as many of the sellers as you can, try and cut down on the impact to the average player (ie spamming) and the economy, and you move on.  If they don't see it, most players don't care about RMT.  A sizable portion (I would say most, but I don't have numbers to back that up) don't care even if they do see it, as long as it doesn't interfere with their game play.  Now that the activities of RMT companies are costing the industry serious money, that is not an option.

My personal feeling is that SOE has the right answer: allow licensed and controlled RMT on segregated servers.  Do your best to stop people who are cheating (botting, exploiting, dupping) to get the gold they sell.  Run the RMT sites out of business by out competing them, or get them to play by the rules.  As far as 'farming,'  if you're playing the game, without cheating, without using a bot, to get the gold you sell, then you're playing the game.  If you're only playing the game to get that gold to sell, while I think that's stupid, I don't care.

The other two answers I'm aware of are:  make RMT a core function of the game play (micro transactions!), and design you game with no tradeable items.  Both of those work, but dramatically impact your core game play.

As an aside to all of this: don't be surprised when you start having to jump through a whole bunch of extra hoops to buy digital downloads and sign up for MMO subscriptions with your credit card.  Game companies would love to make both those process as easy as possible, but they must cut down on the fraudulent purchases.

*Even if the game industry could get countries to enforce their laws, it would not stop RMT sites.  Cocaine is illegal virtually everywhere, but if I really wanted to I could get some in under an hour.  These people are already criminals, they'll just find a different rock to hide under.

See, but what Smed just said if you read between the lines is that this was what they were trying to achieve, but it was NOT the right direction to go with it.  All that CC fraud you get just with subs is now happening to the excahange system as well.  They INCREASED their headache and liability AND need for fraud investigation because now their customers were getting duped as well as the company.  Then all those fradulant exchanges are probably filtered through multiple accounts until the companies sell it to a player or someone else for cash.

The best move they could have made was to move to a microtrans system.  Buy directly from the company, what're the RMTers going to do then? Not much.   Barring that they should have just shut down the exchange system entirely.  All this has done is push the above problem onto another company... probably one of the ones causing it in the first place.  All that CC fraud is still going to happen and the customer service issues are still going to be petitioned to SOE because it's THEIR game, even if they're not the ones running the service.   If you buy a new house, do you bitch at the Homebuilder about the shitty trim work, or do you call the contractor they hired who fucked it up?

I think what Drew's trying to say is that he feels annoy to afford better ship.

As a consumer, I am satisfied with the current system. I'm not a fan of RTM, and it will seriously affect my decision to choose a game.
Those games that choose to exclude it are doing an adequate job of policing the policy. As much as can be done.

Like you say, there will always be people selling and buying virtual stuff for real world money. As long as it's categorized as a cheat or exploit, and punished accordingly, I'm happy.

I do think that if CC fraud is a big issue with buying/selling virtual crap, then it needs to be made more public (daily announcements and whatnot) in games that exclude it. IMO.

Micro-transactions fundamentally change the design of a game.  That's not always a bad thing, but it's not always good either.  Also, if whatever you purchase with your micro-transaction points are tradable, someone will be trying to buy them fraudulently.

As a player, I am unlikely to ever play an MMO with micro-transactions.  Never say never, but the model does not appeal to me as a consumer.  I'm willing to believe that I'm in the minority on this one, however.  As a designer, I think there are a lot of neat things you can do with micro-transactions.

I don't know exactly why SOE is passing off this service to another company, but my reading was a combination of "fraud prevention in subscriptions conflicts with exchange service" and "making this a third party operation means other publishers can/will use it, hopefully choking off the income of RMT syndicates." 

I could be wrong, maybe it's failing entirely.

This company seems to have come out of the blue. Do they have any other clients?

Gold. Literally. :grin:

Drew, I bet you can walk over to the Obama rally at Key Arena and score pretty much anything. I am in Eastgate and can't make it..save me some?  :oh_i_see:

Agreed. This thread is the first I have heard about RMT as fraught with CC fraud. Why is it so hard for SOE to explicitly warn its customers about XYZ and ABC RMT firms? If these companies are operating in jurisdictions beyond SOE's reach then they are operating in jurisdictions from which they cannot fight back with defamation lawsuits, etc.

That said, not all RMT firms are crooks. The few times I have RMTed in the last few years I have never been defrauded (Paypal always) and was treated with superior customer respect. In fact, I am hard-pressed to come up with an example of better customer service.

I don't think the point is that they are defrauding their customers; they are defrauding the game companies to pay for their subscriptions.

Colour me shocked (http://antipwn.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/rmt-professional-powerlevelling-and-so-forth/).

I think when DrewC talks about CC fraud he's talking mostly about their fraud towards the game provider, not the customer. There probably are RMT firms that skim personal credit cards but I get the impression he's talking about chargebacks and paying for accounts with stolen cards. That's my reading of what he said anyway, he is of course free to tell me I have it all backwards.

Upon re-reading Drew's post, I agree that is what he meant. Still, my claim about how easy it is to do business with at least one RMT company is in stark contrast to how many MMOG companies treat their customers, although personally, I have no reason to criticize any of the MMOG publishers I dealt with.

Yes I was talking about charge-backs and fraud in paying for accounts/subscriptions.  I'm sure RMT companies treat their customers well (they're not stupid), and I'm equally sure there are some that operate completely within the bounds of the law, but Fraudulent account purchases by gold spammers/farmers is a huge issue.

That's kinda whack. Like taking a crap when you're in the bathtub.  :uhrr:

My toddler son has done that and it is even uglier than one would think.

I keep hearing people say the spamming is the main thing annoying players. I play EQ2, which has an excellent spam filter, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I'd think the farming would be the worst part, since it does impact gameplay and is impossible to ignore, unlike some /tell caught by a spam filter.

Assuming that 'farming' is being done without cheating (no bots, no dups, no exploits), I don't really understand how 'farming' differs from 'playing the game'.

I farm stuff in WoW all the time.  I've farmed Scarlet Monastery for silk cloth to level tailoring.  I've farmed the elemental Plateau for primals.  I've farmed all kinds of stuff for gold.  It's part of the game.

If the problem is the farmer consuming all of the content in a particular area, making it impossible for others to play the game there, then I would point to that as mostly a case of bad game design.  Yes, the farmer is being a jerk, but if working as a CSR taught me anything, it's that many people need no motivation to be a jerk.  If the farmer can cause a bad game experience for players, so can random_meathead_01.  That should probably be solved with better game systems.

Am I missing something?  I have never encountered a farmer, who was actually playing the game, that bothered me.  I've run into a few macroers that disrupted my play experience, but that's a bit of a separate issue.

Well, tossing aside the topic of poopsocking for a bit, professional farmers can theoretically throw a shitton more /played time into farming than Joe Player can. If the rare drop becomes common after being aggresivley harvested by some sweatshop kid chained to a computer, that's an exploit of the game system.

And now to bring poopsocking back in, the only good thing I can find about RMT is that it exposes the root of a lot of timegrinding in these games.

Better game systems ... that don't require farming?

If you have farming in a game, you inevitably have resource contention unless you instance everything, including world zones, which is just insanity.  You'd have a single-player game with incredible IT costs, so let's throw that right out.

Now, resource contention is horrible in MMOs because people are broken.  They can't share.  And, once you have resource contention in any system, game or otherwise, you now have the basis for an economy.  It's that simple.  If it wasn't RMT'ers, it'd be some other scheme or scam.  Those economies in MMOs never, ever stay completely inside the game world.  They always spill over.  I'm not defending that, it just is.

The thing is, how long has this been true?  10 years? 20?  If you're a game developer, you should know this by now.

I'm constantly amazed that game developers whine about farmers, and RMT, and what not, while simultaneously cranking out and even playing the same bullshit games that create the problem in the first place.  Don't get me wrong.  I hate farmers and the whole RMT boondoggle.  But dammit, quit making resource gathering systems which have all the complexity of a lab rat licking a nicotine bottle, and you'll have mostly solved the problem.

I define farming as repeatedly completing trivial content for the purpose of collecting resources.

Farming is great from a developers perspective.  It takes us little to no time to implement and generates a potentially huge amount of play time.  That's why it keeps showing up in games.  Because we make games in the real world, with budgets and deadlines, so we don't get to make the perfect game.

If one player can prevent several others from engaging in content, and it's not part of a deliberate PvP system, that's a bad design.  It may be a bad design with a good reason behind it, but the solution should be to fix that design, not ban farmers.  If farming, in and of itself, is a bad gameplay experience, then you should look at making farming into a good gameplay experience, and if that's not possible can you move the reward or incentive for farming to something that is a good gameplay experience.

*edit*
Also, you cannot, as a developer, prevent players from making their game experience bad.  If people think the most effective way to 'win' a game involves a miserably boring play experience, they will, by and large, do that.  Even to the point of driving themselves to quit a game they had previously enjoyed.  Allowing people to make a bad gameplay experience is unavoidable, the key is not giving them an incentive to do so.
*edit*

You're absolutely correct: if a game has an economy of any kind (and an economy, by definition, implies limited resources and the ability to trade them), it is virtually impossible to contain that economy within the game.  That's why I said that I think SOE's solution is the correct direction.  That's why one of my other solutions was no tradeable items.

And to be clear, I was not whining about RMT or farmers, I was whining about credit card fraud.

Although I responded to you, I was mostly directing the whining bit to Smedley, who seems to whine about this topic a lot.

However ...


That argument doesn't hold water in the current MMO environment, certainly not with crafting.  There are nothing but bad game experiences, with long boring play times.  Developers haven't provided any alternative, so that's what players do.

Personal disclaimer: I am no longer affiliated with SOE.  I've got no eggs in any basket related to SOE, LiveGamer, EQ2, Station Exchange, or any of that.  I've got no reason to trash them, and I've got no reason to defend them.

I am going to jump in on a quick one here since I spent a good chunk of the most recent years of my professional life dealing with the subject of what I'll kindly call "institutional farmers" at all levels of the conflict, across both EQ and EQ2:

There are definitely institutional RMT companies that treat customers well.  That said, what he describes is absolutely happening.  It's something that's really picked up a lot over the past year. 

Another thing that's picked up lately is where they ask for your uname/password and "they'll do the delivery for you to make it more convenient" and offer to kick in an extra 10% coin.  Then they either strip the account or use you as a mule for passing a bunch of gold to other people.

Why not just say which companies are doing it?  Couple reasons.  First, there are lists of hundreds of disposable urls.  Many of these "networks" are 20 reskins of the same site.  eq2plat4cheap.com might be the "bad guy" one day, and it would be eq2pimpmyberserker.com the next.   Looking at the eq2 spam filter's captured data is an education in itself.

Second, getting to even that unreliable level of identification is highly unlikely. 

At the time of finding out about the issue, on the vendor's end, what they get is a notification that a given charge(s) was charged back by Visa/MC.  It would be on the vendor to call the customer and ask why they did that.  No problem, we're still in the realm of doable.  Here's where it gets better: 

It would then be on the customer to A) be aware of what happened to them and B) respond truthfully ("Well, three months ago, I bought plat from eq2xyzplat.com, and now all these charges I never made showed up!")  Right.

I imagine the conversation as going slightly differently:  "Why did you just charge me for opening 50 accounts?! <pause>  Of course I've never bought coin! How dare you!"

(hint: because the institutionals made their 200 daily spam accounts today with your CC - Tangentially, this is why spammers keep showing up every day, despite there being hundreds of accts banned for it daily. Your Credit Rating At Work.)


We now return you to the un-derailed conversation, already in progress.

Oh as a developer you can certainly create a bad game play experience, no question.  Lots of bad games get made.  Lots of good games have bad pieces in them.

What I was saying is: No matter how many good game play experiences you create, players can choose to play the game is such a way as to suck all the fun out of it.  If they think they can gain an advantage for doing so, some portion of them will.  Even if it drives them to quit the game.

Jesus Christ

As I said before, count me as shocked that people who violate the rules of the game are willing to violate the law as well.

So can I buy a bunch of gold with a credit card and then charge-back the RMT company?  And get away with it, free to roll around in a pile of free gold?  Because it seems to me that if these companies work outside of any legal framework meaningful to anyone not in China, then this ought to work both ways.

Just askin'...

If you could catch em in time to back-charge your card, then yeah, probably. If you could catch em....

Big thanks to the devs, coming informing us what's going on. Bringing it out into the open is a big step towards stopping it. I wonder how many people have stopped buying from farmers since Smed made his big statement....

Shit. I've never been tempted to use any powerleveling/gold/penis enhancement services, and I know that giving them my CC number would be a badwrong idea. It just makes my balls shrivel to think of someone slamming my CC with hundreds of MMOG account subscriptions.