Curse

-Sonata- · Apr 21, 2008, 06:01 PM // 18:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fril Estelin

Very interestingly, the "other side" is also publishing some stats:
http://www.playnoevil.com/serendipit...s-winning.html

Slight increase in price from $6 to $8 in the February-April period apparently explained by holidays in China (strange!).

Most interestingly, it seems that MMO companies are failing to put obstacle in the way of RMT companies, as can be seen in Runescape and EQ2's legit RMT.

(comments on the article are both interesting and funny, particularly the hilarious message from an RMT employee...)

When, in another thread, I learned about SOE and the station-exchange (EQ2 being, or will be part of it) I began researching it myself because questions I asked were never answered.

For instance, I wanted to know if this legit service put a full halt to spamming in game, or a full halt to all 3rd party sales. I was also curious to know if theft, duping, or fraud accounts were still being used.

I came across this article a few weeks ago:
SOE's president John Smedley.

While John seems very optimistic about how the Exchange has been working, there are some very interesting points he states..

Quote:

Originally Posted by From the article

...recently we've seen the fraud rate begin to climb pretty high, because these farmers are becoming professionals.

..."The fraud rate is starting to become a very significant issue," he said of the industry at large. "We’re seeing customers facing farmers, and we're seeing, economically, ourselves and other publishers being hurt."

..."We're seeing a lot of stolen credit cards. Say you buy gold from a service in China -- you may not know it's in China, but you give them your credit card and buy gold only once. They use these credit card numbers to set up new accounts in these games. They buy an EverQuest account key, farm for a month, and then charge it back to the stolen credit card."

..."What happens is that over time, as that rate of chargebacks rises, we start getting fined. We have been fined over a million dollars since June. That's not the chargebacks themselves -- just the chargeback fine. It's brutal; it's the dirty little secret of the industry."

The conclusion that I can come to and to use the best example I think I can find; The battle between game publishers of onlines games and that of RMT services is much like the battle of Virus Protection and Virus programmers.

Virus Protection will make a patch, but not so far down the road the Virus Programmers evolve it and find a new way to get past the patch.

It would appear that while SOE felt they could stamp out the 3rd party dealings by partnering up and making their own RMT, 3rd party RMT just evolved to find a new way to make money off of players and the game.

It will be interesting to see how SOE tackles this new problem with the Exchange.

Anyways, it's a good article to read in full. It shows the road SOE hopes it can take and its ideas for creating such a system, but it also sheds light on what new problems arise in such systems.

bwillcox · Apr 21, 2008, 06:58 PM // 18:58

I wonder if the reduction in RMT will have an effect on the game economy? Seems that with fewer rich players prices for stuff could come down.

Fril Estelin · Apr 21, 2008, 08:09 PM // 20:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by -Sonata-

I came across this article a few weeks ago:
SOE's president John Smedley.

While John seems very optimistic about how the Exchange has been working, there are some very interesting points he states..

This is most interesting indeed, but I'm not surprised one inch by what he says. This was to be expected, because it's happened in security where hackers became professional for the sake of money. In essence, as you higlight later, the problems are similar:

Quote:

The conclusion that I can come to and to use the best example I think I can find; The battle between game publishers of onlines games and that of RMT services is much like the battle of Virus Protection and Virus programmers.

Virus Protection will make a patch, but not so far down the road the Virus Programmers evolve it and find a new way to get past the patch.

Side note: it's even worse, a lot of hackers are now waiting for patches to reverse-engineer the virus.

The problem is the same in the sense that they (hackers, RMT) try to use the resources (programme, game) of other companies (OS/application, MMO) to earn money. Atm hackers are doing much more damage, but I guess that given how little scrupulous these people are, they're bound to end up collaborating (I remember Gaile mentioned lots of account hacking happening via 3rd party RMT apps).

The worse in all this is that, like in security, people (well, the honest ones because I guess a few will claim that it's legit for them, egocentrism FTL) will only react when their account got stolen or when MMO companies will start to charge more money for the anti-RMT services they have to buy (like EQII) or implement.

manitoba1073 · Apr 22, 2008, 04:26 AM // 04:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fril Estelin

1) If it was the case, I don't think it'd be funny as RMT is a plague (you probably didn't intend your sentence to sound like it's really funny, but I thought I'd say it anyway); 2) I don't think it's the case that they're doing the opposite (both Anet and Blizzard made official announcements against RMT) and that Blizzard is more successful at tackling this issue (until further evidence).

P.S.: anyone knows how much 50k GW gold compares to 300 Horde Gold in WoW? (RMT price says Wow's 300go is worth 3 times more than GW's 50k)?

Yes funny means funny haha. Yes Blizzard is doing the oppposite of what Anet is doing in fighting the RMT's and Blizzard is winning.

Yes RMT's are a plague. There really isnt any other way to say it.

Cacheelma · Apr 22, 2008, 04:59 AM // 04:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kashrlyyk

If it is true, than yes Blizzard does the exact opposite of what ANet did with LS!

It is true. But it's not much as doing the exact opposite. Different more like. And as you can see Blizzard is doing a better job at it.

Let me clarify.-

Both Blizzard and Anet are trying to fight RMT. In doing so, Anet put up some announcement about how bad RMT is and have Gaile here coming to some random fansite forum throwing some random number at us (without any hard evidence I might add. But we're supposed to trust her because she's working for Anet, right?). Pretty much everything in GW is the same. Loot scaling (which is there to fight gold seller) is still there. Anti-farming nerfs is still there. Nothing's changed.

Blizzard also put up some announcement about how bad RMT is. They also make sure that players see no need in buying gold by putting tons of new daily quests into the game, most of them with big rewards (and of course the quests are tied-in with heavy storylines and lores and new contents). You can also now do 25 daily quests per day (raised from the limited of 10). Roughly, a level 70 player can make 400g+ out of these 25 daily quests. Gold is easy to obtain for pretty much everyone (with a level70 character), not just the farmers. In-game economy, however, is still intact as though nothing has changed; item prices are still the same. No inflation occurs (largely because the game has a very effective optional money-sink mechanic where gold actually leaves the system instead of just switching hands like it is in GW). All in all nobody is crying about the change, not even one bit.

See the differences now? Why can't Anet do what others do?