The Ethics of Optional Item Sales

[DreadRabbit]

I don't usually play f2p games (GW2 excluding), but I have played few games with the model I described, and RMT simply cannot compete against the user created economy of gold<->$ trading.. They simply cannot sustain it and RMT is almost non-existent in these games.

Specifically, I'm talking about Guild Wars 2 and Wildstar. Neither of those games had heavy RMT presence when I was playing it, it did have quite a bit of advertisement for powerleveling, but that was upon release, I assume the popularity for such services have dwindled by now.

You also forget that both of those games pay far more attention to handling RMT than the NA servers of this game. There's chat filters and a much easier to use report system so that RMT bots can be found and deleted sooner. Not to mention there's harsher consequences for purchasing in game money through RMT in those games.

Also, this:

I don't have a problem with past event items being in the shop.

Items, even vanity items, created for the sole purpose of being exclusively on the shop can open the floodgates to a plethora of problems though. I can name plenty of MMOs that had cool in game obtainable vanity items, then cash shop ones were introduced, followed by the future in game ones being made at a much slower rate and at a much lower level of quality compared to cash shop ones.

What this quote says happens to every single game that starts embellishing the cash shop, both P2P and F2P. This is why I have no problems with there being vanity in our cash shop so long as it was past event-only items. Once you start designing items specifically for a cash shop it begins to snowball and an additional paywall to the subscription fee rises.

Cash shop items being tradeable has merits, yes. In theory this makes it so that players who can't spend more money on this game, but want said items can just buy them off another player. That is nice. But: this can drive players who have neither the time to make money in game and can't spend money revert to RMT more than before if the RMT shop's prices for in game currency are a bargain to what players are selling cash shop items for. Which RMT pays attention to and does. This does eventually cause massive inflation of certain types of items across the board and QoL of players goes down because they can't afford anything as easily as they once could.

It's a slow change, yes. But it does happen.