I take a rather sinister pleasure in watching holy crusaders spout off strange silver bullet ideas to solve the RMT issue. Lets disable auto follow, yeah that will solve the plat farmer problem. Sure great idea, no wait, no it’s not!

We live in a world. It is constantly changing. Either you adapt or you go extinct. Your choice. Plat Farmers, Macro crafters are part of that world. Developers that turn tradeskilling upside down to the point that, /boggle its actualy popular and you can nolonger extort money selling weapons, are also part of the world.

One way of looking at the situation is that Plat Farmers and Macro Crafters are symptoms of a disease rather that the plague itself. They are symptoms of the disease of lazyness and not having enougth time to do “all those tedious and honerous things”. Though some people might actualy find those things rather enjoyable and far from honerous. So do we try to mask the symptoms or should we try to cure the disease itself? Can the disease be even cured? Perhaps it is a terminal illness in some patients.

Another way of looking at the situation is that these Plat Farmers and Macro Crafters are just enterprising business people, that like many other players, have found a niche market. If you view it this way, so long as they are breaking no rules, there is nothing you can do about it and as a capitalist you really should applaude their efforts or beat them at their own game. Just make sure you don’t break any rules or else the feds will eventualy get you as ineffectual as they are.

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In the war against RMT, developers have come up with some solutions but at the same time, some game mechanics promote such practices.

For Example:
Most uber fabled loot in EQ2 is no trade. Thus. unless people start selling loot rights, RMT can play little part in the aquisition of uber fabled loot right? Well, not necessarily. See, to get that piece of uber fabled loot, you must pay with blood and sweat, repair cost and expensive masters on brokers. Those things cost money which if you are raiding 24/7 you are too busy to raise on your own. So who do you turn to to bankroll you?

In my opinion, you can not eradicate RMT. You can reduce its popularity. There will always be people that are willing to pay real money for gold and there will always be people willing to try to sell gold for money. Granted, it is annoying to get spammed by these RMT marketeers but overall I’d say what I see in EQ2 is nothing compared to what I used to experience in Diablo 2.

Also, as unfortunate as this difficulties are I don’t really think they disprove my premise. My theory is that with Exchange Servers working properly to provide a place for RMT players to play legally and with strong discouragement of RMT on non-approved servers a balance can be set up so that players such as yourself can participate in RMT without the majority of anti-RMT players feeling that it damages their game play (I say majority because there are almost certain to be some zealots who will feel that even though RMT is restricted to specific servers the company approval of RMT on those servers somehow effects them). The fact that Station Exchange is not currently working correctly takes it outside of my premise and would only disprove my premise if the difficulties with Station Exchange somehow proved that a company cannot support something like Station Exchange.

Your post has helped me to see something that I had missed before, however. The answer doesn’t necessarily lie with the Station Exchange itself but rather with the servers on which it is legal. Station Exchange is simply a tool to get a bit better leverage on the gold farmers and RMT players but it is the creation of areas where RMT is legal and where it is illegal that provides the answer. RMT servers do not have to provide anything like Station Exchange. Trades can proceed through whatever processes they’ve been using but because the transfers occur on approved servers they are legal. People who wish to engage in RMT will still have much greater incentive to use those servers since there is no risk of their account being banned.

Of course it is still in the company’s interest to set up something like Station Exchange. By making such a tool they provide further incentive for people to choose the approved servers over non-approved servers since it will be unavailable on the non-approved servers. It will also allow them to get a better handle on the larger RMT groups by offering things such as advertisement space. Finally it can be another source of income for the company.

Personally all I have gotten lately from being on Station Exchange is problems trying to buy and sell because of the numerous problems they have had. Also it seems that as of late the number of people using SE to buy and sell has dropped big time, I assume this is also due to the previously mentioned problems.

The problems I see most with this issue is that people are going to get tired of all the SE issues, roll new toons on normal servers, but they are still going to be hooked on the idea of buying plat. So all that SE is doing at the moment is creating a larger number of gold buyers on normal servers.

The overall problem is that RMT isn’t an issue that will be easily solved, if ever solved. As there is always going to be people with more time than others to play, there will also always be those that have more money than time. Many of the latter are going to continue to be willing to spend real world money to keep up with the Jones so to speak.

Short of taking player trading completely from MMOs I really don’t know what can be done to solve this issue. Maybe make it where people have to either craft or quest for all their gear and loot. No broker, no auction house. Just vendors.

Make the vendors then actually have good gear. Gear that players would actually want. Make all items non tradable to other PCs, but allow gear to be hand-me down to alts. If you ask me one of the biggest reasons people end up turning to gold buying is because they don’t want to have to grind or craft all over again to be able to equip their alts when they have perfectly good gear that they are no longer using on another toon.

Of course you could turn everything from coin based to a barter based system. But then all that would happen is people would flock to selling items in place of coin.

BUT- if we want to curb farmers, we’ve GOT TO make use of a reward system that doesn’t involve an exchangable good

The problem I see is that the only true way to do this is to make it so there are no exchangeable goods of significant value. If you simply make the currency non-transferable then the gold farmers will sell items. If you make it so that no item of significant value can be traded you eliminate the role of crafters.

Yes, it would be possible to force gold farmers to change their model from selling coins and dropped loot to crafted items but you will most likely just end up with crafting areas filled with farmers working away just like they use to farm zones.

If it’s profitable for IGE and their ilk to farm and sell items or gold in your game they will do it.

True, but the idea isn’t to stamp them out completely. Rather the goal is to move them to the Exchange Servers. At that point they will be faced with the choice of being able to legitimately make a profit on the Exchange Servers, where they can openly advertise and most of the people who would buy their product have gathered, or try to illegitimately make a profit on the other servers where there are fewer customers, they can’t advertise as openly, and they risk being banned not just from those servers but from the entire game.

By working with such people companies can get a bit more control over them. Do I think that Exchange Servers will completely stamp out RMT on non-RMT servers? No, but I think it may seriously reduce the problem.

If it’s profitable for IGE and their ilk to farm and sell items or gold in your game they will do it. You’ll end up spending just as much time and money policing those servers, and the occasional mistaken banning of an innocent person will cause the same amount of bad PR.

I don’t completely agree with Dan that the devs selling the items is the answer though. The real solution to these issues, and one that Dan mentioned, is to get away from the item centric model. If items or gear are what defines your character then you’re going to want the best items/gear. If the only way to get them is to either grind for money for a week, go on some 4 to 6 hour raid, or buy the money to buy the items from someone like IGE then a protion of your players are going to opt for the easiest route and buy the gold. If, instead, what defines your character isn’t their gear but their skill, or even their level, then their is no market for the sellers of gold and they’ll move on to a game that does have a market.

What’s the difference between a guild mule and a gold farming mule? A RMT exchange ingame and a friendly “twinking?” Developers don’t usually have access to the real-money side of the transaction to verify the actual offense, and without that verification, it’s very hard to tell the difference.

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Beyond that, I don’t see the root RMT issue happening from people naturally accumulating stuff. Most professional gold farmers never play the game that way. They deftly avoid the “drain” in the faucet-drain economy- avoiding buying new loot when they level (though, they might, once leveled, suit up for better efficiency) and maximizing coin production as much as possible. In EQ, they’re avoiding things like rent, broker fees, horses, and other “drain” elements.

That’s a design issue. Drain is very easy to avoid, if your intent is massive accumulation of goods. In fact, I know more roleplayers that RMT than I know uber-lewt players (ok, I know few RMT’ers altogether, but socializers talk more about it ) The Roleplayer is often interested in the more rent-heavy houses in the game and the time they spend in Roleplay scenarios doesn’t earn them any coin. Thus, they’re hit more by the “drain” of the economy and less by the “faucet.” Strangely, their “RMT” purchase used to pay for “drain” stuff is just what the economy needs- more stuff filtered away.

We’re hindered by the design choices of our predecessors. Too many players expect a constant accumulation of wealth. They want that coinpurse to be forever growing. They want grossly different earnings at level 50 than they see at level 10. They want free ammo, and if they don’t get it, they won’t used ranged weapons. They don’t want use-based drain, so they hate repair.

BUT- if we want to curb farmers, we’ve GOT TO make use of a reward system that doesn’t involve an exchangable good- EQ2’s “status” was a step in the right direction- something of value that can’t be traded. Tie expenses for adventuring closer to the reward for adventuring. Minimize the amount of “gain” the gold farmer can expect from 12 hours of play by adding more expenses to that end, and increase the value players see in using non-tradable “status” in the game.

You won’t kill the roaches, but you’ll minimize what they have to feed off of, and maybe more of them will go off to the easier pickings at your neighbor’s.