Reality of RMT

[Ksenia]

You can get rid of RMT but the game needs to abandon certain notions.


In Lord of the Rings Online "Gold Farming" has a whole other meaning because you can do it in the literal sense. Buy soil, water, seeds and some other stuff all from a vendor and go plant them. Part of what you get in the crop is an optional cooking ingredient of Herbs and they drop at about 50% and vendor for 300% what you paid for the farming items you purchased. You can farm around 3 gold an hour doing this.

You never see people spamming gold for LotRO in the game. You could argue gold there has no meaning and you would be right but the truth is, gil here is on borrowed time. That's one of those notions that would need to be abandoned. That you can create an economy in a static PvE gear based game where nothing gets used up. Much like here, all gathered material is used to level and then it's just baggage. They have potions, they have food and just like here they both drop in the loot table and never get made. Much like here you can level up your legendary weapons and convert them to add on items for the next gen of gear. They even go one step further and let people make those items from single use recipes.

It's all in what you want to surrender as game concepts.

tldr, you need to starve them out. No shard throttle, no gil throttle, no grind throttle.

[Asriah]

You can get rid of RMT but the game needs to abandon certain notions...

tldr, you need to starve them out. No shard throttle, no gil throttle, no grind throttle.

You raise a good point, and I agree that game design is the issue, but if Diablo 2 is an example, you don't really need game currency to have value in order to have RMT a problem. Gold was worth nothing in that game but the items themselves... sold themselves.


People usually look at the real money and see it as the main issue here, but it isn't. The problem is that almost every MMO (this one included) has a flawed system in place. These game devs are counting on legit players to keep the market reasonable but it has always been available to people to ruin a market with or without the involvement of real money.

Lets say SE said they just banned 4000 people linked to buy/sale of in game currency for real money. What if instead, you had 4000 people who sat and farmed gold for their own legit uses and ended up screwing up the market anyways.

[Ri_ri]

Is the same problem with everything. No prostitution would happen if there no one to buy, maybe we should kill all man and make this world 100% girl.

But, lesbians...

Anyway, considering the JP servers doesn't have much RMT ads (I don't play on them, personally; just repeating what I've read here), I think what he says is true. If there's no demand, there'll be no supply.
I blame our individualistic culture.