Time for MMO companies to collaborate against RMT/gold-selling (for Anet!)

I agree with this.

Basically, the players are the problem. If no one bought gold, there would be no gold sellers, nor bots to fund them. If there was no demand, there would be no benefit for these people to sell the gold for real currency.

To all of you:

Yes, RMT is officially approved by Anet.

You can buy minipets perfectly legal using your credit card/cash (you can find them in different magazines across the world).

And what can you do with minipets in game? Sell them to others - so you receive the ingame gold.

In that way - you pay real life money for getting ingame money. I call it RMT, and you ?

Well, in order to not be reall money-sink, simple "no more than every x months" rule can be created. But ofc, it wont solve problem of people who don't think about future. Still, i would like to see such "loan" experimented with, but not necessarily in gw.

Also, anet can implement (worthwhile) rewards inaccessible for gold buyers: BMP weapons kinda implement it: they require player to play thought content and reward is untradeable.

WoW modeled its highest gear tiers similarly: Bind on pickup/ Bind on acquire. Those things are definitely valuable, but are not part of market, thus immune to being ebayed.

Once all the "top" items are removed from market urge to ebay might be much lesser.

This is from Blizzard's webpage that Fril linked.

Fril's analogy to the drug trade is pretty good. That is, many of the "users" view it as an essentially victimless crime. They think they are only hurting themselves (if that), but in reality they are supporting an industry that causes much harm to the entire gaming community.

One point not stressed in the Blizzard piece is that these gold selling companies routinely use stolen credit-cards to buy accounts. They bot as much gold as they can before Anet/Blizzard/Sony catches on and finally cancels the account. The credit card companies charge the gaming companies huge fees for the large percentage non-paid, cancelled accounts, which hurts the developers' ability to fund game improvements.

And as to the notion that "nothing can be done," there is some obvious truth to the economic realities, but the larger point to surely false. Look at the campaign against smoking in the US and Europe. Has smoking been eliminated? No. Has it been significantly reduced? Absolutely. Why is that? The main reason is that there is now a social stigma attached to smoking in a way that for a very long time there simply wasn't (this may be greater in the US than in Europe, since the anti-smoking crusade started sooner over here). This change was partially accomplished by villifying the tobacco industry. Whether Blizzard can make players hate gold-sellers as much as the average American now despises cigarette companies remains to be seen.

It seems that Blizzard is starting their own educational campaign to let people know just the sort of harm gold buyers cause by buying in-game gold. It's not a fix that will occur overnight. But just because the change will be gradual and never entirely solve the problem is doesn't mean these sort of initiatives shouldn't be started. I think it's a good start.

GW gold could be available in the online game store, eliminating all the negative aspects you've described. Simple as that.

...

So it's not bad enough that some MMOs use free to play with micro-payment (item mall) business model, now you're suggesting that GW should SELL IN-GAME CURRENCY?

Seriously?

Some BFBs you are huh?

Sorry, but to hail Blizzard as a paragon of virtue in this matter when you can find countless eBay auctions for WoW accounts (lv 70 chars usually) not to mention tons and tons of sites selling WoW gold & items is a bit of a stretch imho, RMT and gold sellers are a much bigger problem for WoW then for any other game.
Putting a up a webpage is cheap, doing something costs money.

An industry wide initiative might indeed be a very good thing but I highly doubt its going to happen.

As for the idea of offering gold in official stores, its a stupid idea that will destroy any gaming economy in existence and will lead to a huge divide between have's and have nots.

yeah as stated above - today u can buy in-game products like minipets for cash thanks to anet and get in-game gold for that. So you pay $ to get platinums. Why not selling the gold in their online store? It will eliminate all the "bad sites" and botts and spammers if you buy cheap gold from the producers. And the gold will give you nothing but only "better look".

Ursan already destroyed its economy and anet did nothing about it. As for "divide between have's and have nots" - Guild Wars is not WoW. The platinums give you nothing but "better look". So your remark is totally pointless. The player will not get "better" because he has 900k, not 10k.

You said "RMT would destroy game economy" - that is in fact ONE BIG FAT LIE.

it's not the game gold offered by so many sites comes from nothing and it flows into game. IT IS COLLECTED in game! Whether by farming gold items and selling them, or ectos, or money dropped by mobs. So it is only the game gold changing the "owner", not some magically created gold outside the game. Learn about economy and inflation, then start to discuss.

Minipets from game magazines?

Let me ask, are they in unlimited supply, readily available for EVERYBODY (obviously not as I can't find it anywhere in my country), and come with 100% guarantee of getting an amount of in-game money?

Obviously NOT. These so-called minipet promotions are IN NO WAY comparable to selling in-game gold. Stop bringing such thing up and hope that your argument is going to fly; it won't.

Look around you, do you think Anet and other game companies NOT SELLING in-game money for their games are BEING STUPID? There's a reason why they don't do it. Trust me, if this is a good idea for them to "make money", they don't need you to tell them to do it.

Let me ask: could you buy a minipet in a magazine for $ and sell it in game for game gold? Yes, you could. Oficially. Its called: buying in-game gold for $

yeah it is called COSTS/TAXES.

No I can't. As I stated earlier they aren't available in my country. And even if you can buy them, I'm quite sure they won't be available forever as they're limited in supply. (do I need to explain the concept of availability AND limitaton of supply to you)

And even if I have such minipet, it's not guaranteed to net me a fix amount of in-game gold; I have to sell it to someone in-game and the price they're willing to pay will be varied.

These problems won't exist with direct in-game currency selling, which is why I said you can't say "since we have this, we should also have that" as you try to.

In either case, you support one thing, you are killing another thing. I personally don't see anything wrong with selling/buying gold in MMORPG's. Some people work their asses off, and would like to have certain things in-game, but don't have the time to get it, and when they finally do, it's worthless because everyone already has one.

On another note, look at how much 'employment' there has been since the farming/selling of gold has started. That would be one heck of a layoff if it was stopped. Sure some people are skeptical about the 'employment' side of it...seeing it as a joke. But hey, if someone is willing to 'employ' someone else to do the work for them, pay them good money, and make profit out of it, then that's just good business. Money makes the world go around, yes, in games too.

Just like in-game gold, which is not available in every amount every time. There's no difference between spending your $ on minipets and getting gold for them and spending your $ on the gold directly - apart from one thing: minipets are sold with AN's permission. HYPOCRISY.

My only take on this is maybe people wouldn't buy gold if items didn't cost insane amounts of gold, and farming was so annoying and boring.

Not everyone has 3-4 hours to spare a day farming, many of us have jobs, family and other stuff to deal with.

So there look at this is maybe people wouldn't buy gold if players weren't so damn greedy and sell items for insane amounts of gold + XXX ectos... I'm looking at you Mini Panda Bear.

There always many sides to these sort of things.

I don't support Gold buying, but I can understand why some people do it.

Clearly you need an explanation (or maybe you're trolling. But I'd rather see the goods in people).

You're suggesting that Anet should sell in-game currency because they're doing just that now by offering minipets from magazines (which can be traded for in-game currency with other players).

I'm telling you that, two things (Anet selling gold AND Anet giving minipets) are NOT THE SAME.

For minipets.-

- Not everybody can get it.
- They're in limited supply (one day there won't be none left for you to get).
- You may not be able to sell it to other players at the price you expect. As a result, you might not get as much in-game gold as you hope for when you pay for the magazine.

For in-game gold sold by Anet.-

- Everybody who can access AND use the online store (basically most of us) can buy it.
- It's available as long as Anet wants it to.
- You get EXACTLY what you pay for, no more no less.

Clear enough? Please just admit you're trolling so I don't have to waste my time any further.

Clearly you cannot read I'm suggesting that Anet should sell in-game currency to stop other sites from doing it, stop all the botting and spamming. And I'm suggesting that thanks to Arena Net you can already buy in-game gold for your cash (minipets case).

Sell in-game currency and the cost of a minipet will, I wager, quadruple at least possibly more.

Yes, you can get a minipet as a free gift, you cannot buy a minipet from Anet in any way, shape or form so you're argument is based on nothing.
I just got a new minipet, 2nd birthday of my char, is that also gold selling by Anet in your definition?

Actually, I'd envision selling it at very slightly below the current goldseller rates. Believe me, most people who are willing to spend that much money on IG gold are already spending it at the goldsellers, since clearly money > sense. How many players do you know who would pay $80 ish for 500k?

The truth is, Anet is likely to be swapping the revenue generated by these people having to buy new accounts for them buying IG gold from the IG store. The gain in revenue would only really be from honest players and the reality is that it's likely to be relatively small percentage of the IG population who would do this.

If inflation was going to drive everything through the roof in price, it already would have, since all those stacks upon stacks of duped ambraces and ectos are still out there.

Edit : I should add that I think adding this now would probably be a bad idea. This should be included in a game before it is launched, if it is to be included at all.

The point is, Anet can drive the goldsellers out of business because it costs Anet nothing to be cheaper than them, since they have no operation cost associated with acquiring the gold.

I would assume the ban stick would also be wielded more heavily, since they would have the funds to find and ban everybody involved in a dodgy trade.

Well.. not always. The game company can go however low it wants. It costs them no significant time to create as much gold as they want. Of course, to undercut the gold farmers, I have to wonder if they wouldn't have cause game-ending inflation.

The problem here is that they're effectively robbers engaging in what is, in a roundabout way, money laundering. There is, however, no in-game police force to stop them. I would like to see some mechanism for trusted users to be "deputized" in-game as a volunteer police squad. They would have the ability to investigate and ban players for engaging in EULA infractions, with the stipulation that they must complete a report that is made public, completely with evidence, to help avoid rampant abuse of the system. I should note that this would be mostly used to stop bot accounts quickly, since the turnaround on a report to support is not very good.

Frankly, I'd also like to see all IP addresses originating from any machine on an open proxy (or misconfigured gateway at an ISP), or from any country east of Luxembourg, blocked from U.S. and European servers completely. Neither of these things is particularly complicated to do.