Journalists often talk about the wall that's supposed to exist between editorial and advertising, and I say 'supposed to' because more and more, in all kinds of journalism, that wall has been breached, often for questionable ends. But now it seems the scaling of that wall has resulted in something that many magazine readers will appreciate -- the editor of PC Gamer has announced that the periodical will no longer accept ads from companies like IGE. Honestly, I'm amazed.
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Jan 17, 2006
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I'm amazed too, but it's irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. There's a strong demand for virtual items, and thus, they will be sold. Lack of formal advertising hasn't stopped pot from being quite popular.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 17, 2006 at 13:49
About f%#&ing time!
good on 'em!
Posted by: Cenn | Jan 17, 2006 at 13:52
I think it's relevant in that this magazine considers the good will of their readership by taking this stand to be worth more than IGE's guaranteed back-cover ad buy.
Putting their money where their mouth is, literally.
Posted by: Scott Jennings | Jan 17, 2006 at 14:29
Matt >it's irrelevant in the larger scheme of things
I can see your point, but I'm not so sure that the norms of the gaming community at large are so irrelevant. Like it or not, magazines like PC Gamer probably contribute more to setting those norms than Terra Nova. Explicitly pulling the advertising for companies like IGE does more than simply cut off a marketing venue - it stigmatizes the very business IGE is involved in. Stigma against gold farming creates pressures (whether market-based or otherwise) to find solutions rather than acquiesce in the practice. Vederman alludes to this in criticizing what he sees as Blizzard's lacklustre efforts against farmers.
Posted by: Peter Edelmann | Jan 17, 2006 at 14:31
Scott Jennings wrote:
I think it's relevant in that this magazine considers the good will of their readership by taking this stand to be worth more than IGE's guaranteed back-cover ad buy.
How does that make it relevant? What effect does this actually have besides mollifying the vocal minority (~30%) who oppose gold sales? It's like Blizzard banning a few gold farmer accounts here and there. Mollifies the vocal minority without actually requiring them to do anything serious. It has no real effect on the business of IGE and company.
This reminds me of those photo ops that police like to take with seized drugs. "Look! We seized half a ton of cocaine!" Meanwhile, 100x that amount gets through, because the demand is there.
As long as players demand the services IGE and company provides, they're going to be provided. Remember: It is the playerbases driving this demand, not some nefarious third party force. The players themselves created IGE.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 17, 2006 at 14:34
A question: When journalists write about MMOs in outlets like PC Gamer, they sometimes point to their status in the world ("Level 60 Dwarf Warrior") in their articles. Isn't this part of the way they establish credibility? Should such attempts to exploit in-game accomplishments beyond the game also be summarily rejected?
Not that I'm a big fan of IGE. It's just that, as Matt suggests above, it's tilting at windmills to hold to a romantic view that we can limit (through banning advertisements) what is at stake for people in MMOs (and what things of value will circulate beyond them).
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | Jan 17, 2006 at 14:36
What effect does this actually have besides mollifying the vocal minority (~30%) who oppose gold sales? It's like Blizzard banning a few gold farmer accounts here and there. Mollifies the vocal minority without actually requiring them to do anything serious. It has no real effect on the business of IGE and company.
Actually, I'd disagree here, although I agree with you on the equating of virtual vice to the online variety. Simply put, IGE has been trying to purchase respectability - the appearance that there's nothing at all sleazy or disreputable about buying online gold from them. This knocks that strategy down a peg, and in a highly visible manner. Is PC Gamer using this to appear "holier than thou" with the competition? Sure. But at the same time, I'm just grateful someone is taking such a stand; you have to start somewhere.
As long as players demand the services IGE and company provides, they're going to be provided. Remember: It is the playerbases driving this demand, not some nefarious third party force. The players themselves created IGE.
Absolutely. I don't think anyone disagrees with this, no matter where they stand on RMT in general or in specific games. Again, it's precisely like the drug trade - fund bombing runs on impoverished coca farmers in Peru all you want, but as long as people are still buying cocaine in America, it'll still come from somewhere.
Posted by: Scott Jennings | Jan 17, 2006 at 14:41
I applaud PC Gamer for this move - but I don't think it will make that much of a difference as many have said already.
Sadly, Gold and Item farming is a reflection of that aspect of North American culture that says in effect, "if I can't get there legitimately, I can always buy my way there if I have enough cash". In this sense its a reflection of the notion that having more money makes you a morally superior person in our society, and that in any environment rich people should have more rights and capabilities. This Capitalistic approach to gaming is going to prove hard to combat, as many players think its entirely appropriate that they "save time and effort" by simply buying gold, items or accounts to let them get ahead of the rest of the crowd. I have seen many postings on various forums stating that the poster didn't have the time to level up a character, or had better things to do - and that since they had the cash to *buy* what they wanted they saw nothing wrong in doing so.
I detest this personally, since I prefer to actually achieve goals myself and enjoy the process of getting to a reward. I would personally feel like I cheated myself of the experience if I bought an in game element or account with high level characters on it. If I don't enjoy the process of getting to that point, why play the game at all? Unfortunately many people seem to confuse *having* something with *earning* something.
I think IGE and companies like it will never leave us unless we can foster the view that purchasing in game items like this is poor sportsmanship - and that sportsmanship matters (since to most players it doesn't even seem to be a recognizable term these days, let alone something to extole). Would anyone watch Wimbledon if the competitors could simply buy their way onto the field?
Posted by: Warren Grant | Jan 17, 2006 at 15:03
Would anyone watch Wimbledon if the competitors could simply buy their way onto the field?
We watch Yankees games, don't we?
(/duck)
Posted by: Scott Jennings | Jan 17, 2006 at 15:15
Is there any validity to the common equation of "farming" with work? From that equation is derived the notion that one could subtract several hours of real work (thus wages) from one's dayjob and purchase a net result in the MMO. In this way it has been argued that if ALL one seeks to do with several hours of gaming time is earn money, why doesnt that player simply turn off the computer, go to work, earn the money, and then purchase the desired in game result.
Disclaimer This is not my personal view on the matter.
Devils adovcate!
Posted by: Lanky | Jan 17, 2006 at 15:50
While I agree this is a good thing, I think people are being a bit over-generous in praising the editors of PC Gamer for their public-spirited sacrifice. What actually happened, I strongly suspect, was more along these lines:
(Knock knock)
"Hello, PC Gamer editorial board, how can we help you?"
"Hello there. I'm the marketing manager from Blizzard, and these are my colleagues from Sony and NCSoft. We're becoming a trifle concerned about these ads you're carrying for people making money off our games by violating our EULAs."
"Well, freedom of speech, editorial independence, their money is as good as anyone's, blah blah blah."
"You might want to ask your accountant how much of your advertising revenue comes from them, and how much from us. That's a very nice budget you've got there ... be a shame if anything happened to it, now wouldn't it?"
"Err ... yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir."
Posted by: Ross Smith | Jan 17, 2006 at 16:10
Following on Ross' sentiment, I wonder if there isn't a legal liability at stake. If a newspaper runs ads that encourage the wholesale violation of contracts, can they be sued? I didn't read closely, but didn't Grokster get nailed not so much for committing piracy but for encouraging people to trade files they've agreed not to trade?
Posted by: Edward Castronova | Jan 17, 2006 at 16:16
I definitely believe PCG is making a "holier-than-thou" PR move. I really wonder if they are truly giving up "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in ad revenue. That would almost seem stupid to me if I didn't think they could immediately fill the gap with some lesser evil (which they undoubtedly will), so in fact there is no loss of ad revenue. Not to bash PCG because I'm glad they've taken this stance ... but everything with a grain of salt for this cynic.
Posted by: Chip Hinshaw | Jan 17, 2006 at 16:52
"Sadly, Gold and Item farming is a reflection of that aspect of North American culture that says in effect, 'if I can't get there legitimately, I can always buy my way there if I have enough cash'."
This is far from a North American conceit. Bourdieu, for example, wrote quite a bit about the "exchange rates" between cultural and economic capital in European contexts.
Posted by: Liz Lawley | Jan 17, 2006 at 16:59
Matt, where do you get your figures on only 30% of players disapprove of RMT? And if 70% of the players are in favor of it, why do Sony's "Station Exchange" server seem to be struggling, rather than becoming the dominant part of EQ2? Correct me if I'm wrong -- I'm not an EQ2 player myself -- but is it not true that the concept has not expanded beyond the initial 2 servers? It would seem that if the overwhelming majority of players wanted RMT, the numbers would be 31 RMT, 2 non-RMT, instead of the other way around.
And, of course, a lot has to do with how you phrase the question. "Do you think in-game assets should belong to the players to do with as they please?" will get you vastly different responses than "Do you think it's fair that people who have lots of money IRL get away with cheating in the game?" Yet both of those could be read as "Do you approve or disapprove of RMT?"
No one solution will keep the damage caused by cheating, whether it is RMT, hacks, exploits, or whatever, to tolerable levels. I wrote a long rant about that over on Broken Toys. The only thing that will work to stop RMT is a multi-pronged approach: attack the supply, reduce the demand, make it simultaneously more expensive for the buyers and less profitable for the sellers, and impale the avatars of cheaters on spikes over the gates of Orgrimmar (or hang them from the walls of SF, etc., as relevant to your game of choice).
Posted by: Wanderer | Jan 17, 2006 at 17:01
Scott Jennings wrote:
Actually, I'd disagree here, although I agree with you on the equating of virtual vice to the online variety. Simply put, IGE has been trying to purchase respectability - the appearance that there's nothing at all sleazy or disreputable about buying online gold from them. This knocks that strategy down a peg, and in a highly visible manner. Is PC Gamer using this to appear "holier than thou" with the competition? Sure. But at the same time, I'm just grateful someone is taking such a stand; you have to start somewhere.
Why is it important to you (or anyone else) that they are or are not respectable though? The whole argument I hear against IGE is that they ruin the experience for some players. You say later in your post that you recognize that it's futile to try to stem demand-driven trade by cutting down on advertisements, so what does it matter if their respectability is knocked down? If it has no real effect, isn't it just pettiness to care?
--matt
You say this and turn around and admit that nothing like this is going to have any practical effect.
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 17, 2006 at 17:05
Whoops. Ignore the last line in my above post. Editing mistake.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 17, 2006 at 17:08
Wanderer wrote:
Matt, where do you get your figures on only 30% of players disapprove of RMT?
Two independently commissioned surveys. I know it sounds like a cop-out, but I'm not permitted to tell you anything else there.
And if 70% of the players are in favor of it, why do Sony's "Station Exchange" server seem to be struggling, rather than becoming the dominant part of EQ2?
Probably because people want to play with the general crowd, not be segregated onto a 'special server.'
It would seem that if the overwhelming majority of players wanted RMT, the numbers would be 31 RMT, 2 non-RMT, instead of the other way around.
But I didn't say the overwhelming majority wanted RMT. I said that approximately 30% oppose it. Approximately 30% like it, and the rest pretty much don't care. You have no reason to believe me here, of course, and as I wasn't privy to the methodology of the surveys, I can't speak to their accuracy, but they were conducted by reputable third party firms.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 17, 2006 at 17:11
[Shameless plug alert!]
Liz wrote:
This is far from a North American conceit. Bourdieu, for example, wrote quite a bit about the "exchange rates" between cultural and economic capital in European contexts.
For an extended discussion of what this means for virtual worlds, see this essay.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | Jan 17, 2006 at 17:28
(I'm happy that someone else pointed out that this is not merely some "evil North American Anglo Capitalistic" phenomenon.)
It is impossible to theoretically prevent RMT from occurring without reducing a commercial MMO to a trivial endeavour. Fact is, players place value on their entertainment experience within the game. Since this value exists, and there exists a mutually recognized store of value, and a means of exchange, a market arises.
The ~30% minority of players who materially oppose RMT, quoted above, is probably very conservative. The virtual asset market approaches 1bn USD globally (2005), and is expected to grow to upwards of 7bn USD by 2009. Participation in this behavior is enormous, and growing, even if 70% of players do not directly participate, they are willing beneficiaries of the market.
The problem with IGE and others like them is that virtual asset markets are not efficient, and are often effectively "underground". This allows IGE to fix prices, extort suppliers (the real farmers, which usually aren't IGE employees but quasi contractors in China, etc.), and charge upwards of 400% markup for brokering the deal.
If an efficient market were established, prices would come down to buyers, brokers like IGE would be disintermediated. More importantly, power would return to the game publishers as the increased liquidity would put more emphasis on internal game markets, allowing designers and admins to more effectively manage their games' economies.
Finally, as to whether there is some legal risk by "promoting" EULA violations: just because publishers claim ownership over virtual property does not make it so. Many aspects of virtually every game EULA are untested in courts, and a good number of those would not survive the test. If publishers were so sure of their claims vis-a-vis virtual assets, they would have taken IGE (a US company operating in California), to court years ago. In fact, they are reticent to risk having a judge establish virtual property rights.
Posted by: randolfe | Jan 17, 2006 at 17:34
"You might want to ask your accountant how much of your advertising revenue comes from them, and how much from us. That's a very nice budget you've got there ... be a shame if anything happened to it, now wouldn't it?"
"Err ... yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir."
I doubt very much that this was the result of a threat to advertising revenue from the 'afflicted' corporations. If there was a threat at all from publishers, it was much more likely along the lines of "guess you won't be getting any more exclusives from us," which has a far bigger effect on a mag like PC Gamer.
Even giving PCG the benefit of the doubt, which as a oft-times game journalist, I think is only fair, I'm not sure the decision to ban the ads represents the editorially brave gesture it's being described as.
It's also worth noting that the editor states that he doesn't want his magazine taking money from 'gold-farmers' like IGE. Nowhere in his letter to his readers does he bother to present a quote from IGE executives, who have vociferously claimed in the past that they don't farm gold at all. Rather they have claimed that they operate strictly as a middleman between farmers and players. As far as selling powerlevelling services, the situation is even more morally (and certainly legally) ambiguous. None of this is mentioned in the letter to readers.
It's frankly not a journalistic/editorial function to 'protect' gamers, the industry, or anyone else for that matter. And simply selling advertising in no way serves as an endorsement of the product in question. Rather, using editorial fiat to selectively pull ads is to engage in industry politics to an extent that doesn't really serve either the reader or the editorial department. Though it may occasionally be good business, its almost never good journalism.
Posted by: monkeysan | Jan 17, 2006 at 17:34
. alert :)
Posted by: monkeysan | Jan 17, 2006 at 17:37
sorry, that shoulda bee <./i> alert. =]
Posted by: monkeysan | Jan 17, 2006 at 17:38
You say later in your post that you recognize that it's futile to try to stem demand-driven trade by cutting down on advertisements, so what does it matter if their respectability is knocked down? If it has no real effect, isn't it just pettiness to care?
I personally do not want RMT outside the game developer's control to become the publically accepted norm (insert 30 pages of ranting on why here -> <-) and I do believe that it does have an effect. Not in stemming the black market, but in curtailing its march to "white market" status and thus invalidating any pretense of an ability of game makers to police their own creations.
On another board (Quarter To Three) there was a similar thread where the editor of another large computer gaming magazine said, in effect, he didn't see what the fuss was about, because he played WoW and he thought he should be allowed to pay $25 to get his epic mount. My response was basically, that if I start a for-pay warez site, it's OK to advertise that with his magazine too, because I think I should be allowed to do it. It didn't go over well.
Posted by: Scott Jennings | Jan 17, 2006 at 18:40
Scott wrote:
I personally do not want RMT outside the game developer's control to become the publically accepted norm (insert 30 pages of ranting on why here -> <-) and I do believe that it does have an effect. Not in stemming the black market, but in curtailing its march to "white market" status and thus invalidating any pretense of an ability of game makers to police their own creations.
OK, fair enough in terms of your motivation. I also don't want it out of my control, but then, I designed our games in a way to ensure that it would largely stay within our control. Games like EQ and WoW may as well have been designed to welcome the RMTers in with the red carpet. Still, I'm all for developer control over their own creations, of course.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 17, 2006 at 19:03
I'm one of those folks who could line up his copies to make the whole "PC GAMER" from the binding graphics. Long time reader, they're good at some stuff but not so at others.
I took this move by PC Gamer as little more than a way for them to try and establish street cred in a genre they've gotten so wrong for the past few years.
The ad revenue from IGE is no more nor less than anyone else's. Given the number of magazines dedicated almost solely to computer games (not many), I doubt they have any issue finding someone else to take IGE's place.
Posted by: Darniaq | Jan 17, 2006 at 20:52
As a gamer, I want to have the choice to play on a server where it's my skill (or at least my commitment) that matters, not my RL wealth.
Game companies want to sell me that experience.
My big beef with the RMT crowd is that they want to take away the game companies' freedom to sell me what I want to buy, and take away my freedom to buy what I want to play. That's what it's about, really: whether or not a game company has the right to decide what kind of game they're going to sell and whether or not I have the right to play the kind of game I like. The RMT parasites say we don't.
Parasites have no rights. Not if they're living in my my lower intestine, and not if they're living in my MMORPG.
Posted by: Wanderer | Jan 17, 2006 at 21:39
Warren Grant wrote:
Unfortunately, in all of the games that I've seen that have any significant problem with RMT, the set of game design and game rules foster an immense and fundamental disrespect for the notion of achievement being tied to the player's avatar.
Typically, these are item-centric games or games where player power can be purchased rather than earned.
In every game that I have seen of this type, we see the precursor event that wrecks the notion of "sportsmanship" in the acquisition of player power: rampant and unbridled twinking.
When someone gives his "kid brother" or guildmate a massive competitive advantage (over "straight up" players) for the receiver's character simply because they can, there is no longer a fair competitive landscape for those without patrons to twink them to the same level.
RMT arises as a natural response to this. But instead of using social capital to exploit this massive-unearned-power-transfer design flaw, RMT folks use cash to give them easy access to precisely the same game-wrecking mechanics that the twink fiends have always used.
Brask Mumei pointed that out on the Broken Toys thread mentioned earlier.
The solution as I see it (if the goal is to get back to a fair competitive landscape that doesn't allow "cheating") is to fix the underlying design flaw of allowing unrestrained transfers of unearned power between characters... instead of disparaging one set of "cheaters" (the RMTers) while giving a different set of "cheaters" (the hardcore twinkers) a free pass to wreck the competitive landscape.
If you curtail unbalancing levels of twinking (enforced by code), you'll see RMT of gold/items naturally disappear... or more likely, not arise in the first place.
RMT of accounts and powerleveling services are another matter, and there are other technical means to limit the scope or impact of this, as has been discussed numerous times here on Terra Nova.
Posted by: Barry Kearns | Jan 17, 2006 at 21:56
Oh, and would anyone watch Wimbledon if the more popular / well-connected players had ultra-rare "Tennis Rackets of Boost Serve Speed"... with the speed bonuses tied to how popular they were?
Wimbledon is a meaningful example of a fair game precisely because the achievements are non-transferrable, and players can't get a meaningful competitive advantage gifted to them... which means they can't buy one either. It's also not item-centric, it's skill-centric.
Eliminating only the ability to "buy" a Wimbledon advantage in the scenario above (without also eliminating the gift advantage) wouldn't somehow make it a fair game... but it would make it a closer analogy to today's MMO games where RMT is attacked than the existing Wimbledon.
Posted by: Barry Kearns | Jan 17, 2006 at 22:15
Good points all Barry.
I think with regards to the evils of Twinking (which I admit I am prone to at times), I think Cryptic has done a decent job with their design for City of Heroes/Villains. There is effectively no loot/items to be transfered, and while there is effectively a currency in the form of Influence it really only allows you to push a lower level character to the top end of their spectrum at any given level, and a regular character could theoretically be in the same state given luck and/or a lot of effort farming for Enhancements (the only drops of any sort in game). There is very little in the way of true Twinking you can do in COH/COV as a result. Now, this is resolving the problem by avoiding that type of content, so perhaps is a poor solution :)
With regards to sportsmanship, very few players I have encountered in MMOs seem to really get the concept of enjoying a fair fight. I really don't understand it to be honest. I would have thought that playing sports in school, watching sports teams compete etc would have inculcated some sense of sportsmanship into most teens/adults these days, but most people I have met seem to want to gain every advantage possible, tilt the playing field as much as possible their way, and win at all costs - including buying the right items, PLing services or whatever if needs be in some cases, solely for the sake of always winning. On the forums, most of the people I have discussed sportsmanship with don't even seem to see it as a valid or worthwhile concept. Its actually this aspect of gamers - not the games themselves - that has mostly turned me off of PvP in most games. I don't care to be associated with most of the people who enjoy PvP sadly :P
Posted by: Warren Grant | Jan 17, 2006 at 23:03
I was just surprised that "the Vede" is now EIC! (apparently this happened in November) -- if his RL persona is anything like what he's been presenting over the history of PCG, this doesn't surprise me at all. :-)
Posted by: greglas | Jan 17, 2006 at 23:31
The RMT parasites say we don't.
Parasites have no rights. Not if they're living in my my lower intestine, and not if they're living in my MMORPG.
Interesting that such a high level of discourse is apparently welcome so long as you're not of the dissenting opinion.
So long as a means of exchange exists, and the players of the game place value on the experience, some form of a market will arise. This has always been true, it is only accelerating now due to the pervasiveness of commercial MMOs.
And, why is real-world wealth any less troubling vis-a-vis a player's standing/status/level than the amount of free-time that player has to devote? Doesn't this simply cause a different form of layering which is arguably equally as "unfair". Might a WOW player be offended that "welfare powergamers" are detracting from her gaming experience? If she needs to overcome the social-currency inflation caused by these folk, and does so through RMT, who exactly caused the problem?
It's a matter of perspective. There is an equally powerful argument that RMT is a democratizing force, allowing casual players to purchase social-currency. (But then again, apparently I'm in the Kingdom Monera for thinking so).
Posted by: randolfe_ | Jan 18, 2006 at 01:32
Formal 'mainstream' advertising legitimises a thing, to one extent or another. It's removal is a good step. That it was published in the first place is an indictment of the gaming press.
RMT in a game that explicitly states it before you sign up - fine.
RMT in game that goes against the EULA is wrong - the playerbase sure as hell didn't sign up for it.
And yes, it is cheating =P
Posted by: Alex Holdsworth | Jan 18, 2006 at 02:35
Typically, these are item-centric games or games where player power can be purchased rather than earned.
In every game that I have seen of this type, we see the precursor event that wrecks the notion of "sportsmanship" in the acquisition of player power: rampant and unbridled twinking.
Good point. And the precursor to twinking is beta participation, which gives an entire class of players an unfair and essentialy insurmountable competitive advantage relative to the rest of the population.
Posted by: monkeysan | Jan 18, 2006 at 02:37
I think part of the problem here is a rather myopic view on the part of "Pro farmer" players with regards to the overall health of a MMOG. I have an B.S. and a Masters in business and I tend to think of MMOGs as true virtual economies. The true effect of virtual currency sale goes far beyond the simple enablement of players to violate the ToS of a game (aka cheat).
Think of it like this:
Currency farming/sale in a virtual game is essentially the equivalent of the US government suddenly printing trillions of new dollars and handing it out to everyone for free. Initially, everyone might be "rich" but the market will quickly adjust to this abundance of new currency in the system. This adjustment is what people typically call inflation.
Why does inflation happen? Even though there is an abundance of money now available, the resources that people purchase with that currency is still relatively fixed. This means that there is instantly much more demand for items and not enough to go around, the prices in the market will now rise to a new equilibrium where prices are such that they exactly meet demand. The new prices will be much higher than the previous price. This is a fundamental principle of the concept of supply and demand.
Why does this matter? Because in my example, EVERYONE got a piece of the new money produced thus, the net effect on the prices relative to wealth is nil. However! when farmers sell currency, everyone DOES NOT get an equal piece of the new currency being pumped into the economy. Thus, while prices will still rise as they did in the previous example, the prices relative to wealth for a large percentage of players will rise wildly.
What would be an example of this in the real world? Imagine that the US government printed trillions of dollars but instead of distributing it to everyone, they only gave that money to half the people in the country. What would happen if you were part of the half that got shafted? You would wake up one morning with the exact same amount of money in your bank account as the day before, but a loaf of bread would cost $10, gas would be $13 a gallon. You get the idea...
Now before you all jump on that analysis of the problem, I realize that it is an oversimplification of the issues however, my goal was to illustrate one of the core problems with virtual currency sale. You can see these kinds of problems in every MMOG since they first came out. Examples?
I played ultima online for 8 years.
When the game was still popular, the sale of gold was pretty common. Rare items such as artifacts and large houses often costed tens (and sometimes hundreds) of millions of gold. Far out of the reach of the common player. Had gold sale not been present in that game, this would not have been the case as no one would have that much money and thus, the price would never get that high because the sellers would know that no buyer exists at that stratospheric a price level.
I now play Lineage 2. The same problem exists. The top of the line gear, A grade, costs over 150 million for a suit of armor and anywhere from 50 to 230 million for weapons. I personally use every in-game system to make money that I can. I also do a lot of buying and reselling items to make my money. That being said, I think the most money I have ever had on all my characters combined was roughly 50 million. I choose to not buy adena online because I view the concept of paying money for pixels in a game that I play for recreation absurd. If other people purchasing adena didn't affect me, I could care less. Unfortunately, it affects me quite a bit.
Of course, on top of the economic impacts of farmers, there is also a gameplay aspect of it. I can't count the number of times I have been driven out of an area or not been able to hunt in a prime area because half a dozen bot parties were taking all the mobs. I actually quit the game for about 2 months because of this but in the end, I'm an online game addict and I came back... :-) Sucks to be me.
Posted by: Matt Spielman | Jan 18, 2006 at 03:59
Guys, the farmers are irritating in the game, not outside it. They hog resources. Why should I have to compete for resources with players who do it for a living?
You can't excuse it by claiming market pressures. In one way or another the free market wants all kinds of stuff -- illegal drugs, free HBO, pirated MP3s, etc.
Posted by: Mark Asher | Jan 18, 2006 at 04:33
On the statistic that 30% of players disapprove of RMT.
1. 30 percent is a lot
2. 30 percent is an underestimate of the percentage of the fanbase that would be better off without RMT. How many players know that RMT is why they have to grind gold so much? How many know that RMT is why so many uber items can only be obtained by raiding? How many know that RMT is why powergamer culture dominates?
In cost-benefit analysis, we're very wary of surveys that simply ask "do you oppose this new school?" Who would oppose a new school? Well, what if it cost $400 billion? But that's not stated in the question.
Such questions are not worth much, because they do not specify a policy alternative, or any costs or benefits, and they do not help the respondent form an accurate hypothetical counterfactual world in which the proposed change has happened.
Current MMORPG players can't imagine what games without RMT would be like because RMT has been polluting games for some time.
Not only that, but surveys of current players carry a bias: they fail to assess the opinions of players who have left games because of RMT and its many negative consequences.
Bottom line: Getting rid of RMT will improve gameplay for the vast majority of players. The 30 percent opposition figure is misleading.
Posted by: Edward Castronova | Jan 18, 2006 at 09:26
Warren>I have met seem to want to gain every advantage possible, tilt the playing field as much as possible their way, and win at all costs - including buying the right items, PLing services or whatever if needs be in some cases, solely for the sake of always winning.
It's that sense of entitlement that comes with shelling out $50 upfront and $15 a month for a game. It's that single-player mentality. I've bought the game, therefore I should "win" it. As much as there are other humans playing the game, I think that for many players those other humans are just really intelligent NPC's who make the game that much more "real". The game is still all about "me". I am the hero of this story. I am the champion who will defeat evil at every corner. The world is MY sandbox. Everyone else exists to do the service of bettering my experience in Game X. At least, that's what I observe in many mmo's.
And I was guilty of it myself at one time, although I probably wouldn't have identified it as I did above. My first mmo was UO which I loved up until the first time I got PK'd, which (somewhat remarkably now that I think about it) did not happen until several weeks into playing. I was outraged! It was completely unfair and was unquestionably "cheating" in my mind. This was MY game! *I* was the hero! By God, only through some trickery or underhanded hacking should one player be able to kill another!
Well, I got over it and became somewhat adept at avoiding PK'ers. I still thought it was cheap and unfair, but I kept silent and awaited the Trammel/Felucca split with much eagerness ... until I actually got there. After playing in the non-PVP space for just a few weeks, I was suddenly missing the terror of getting ganked and losing loot. It turned out to be the one immersive element that I now miss dearly in games. It certainly opened my eyes to the fact that it ISN'T all about *me* in the game. I still think that level of PVP (losing loot and heavy death penalties) is a hard-sell (even to me), but I just can't help but feel like a certain "realness" is gone. By no means am I calling for any sort of broad revival of such "features", I'm just noting that it did add value of a sort to the experience.
Posted by: Chip Hinshaw | Jan 18, 2006 at 09:51
Wanderer wrote:
> As a gamer, I want to have the choice to play on
> a server where it's my skill (or at least my
> commitment) that matters, not my RL wealth.
>
> Game companies want to sell me that experience.
Well, then I hope you aren't playing any of the current graphical MMOs, because none of them "want to sell you an experience" based on skill.
They are selling you an experience based on one thing, and one thing only: time.
Honestly, games like WoW, City of Heroes, EQ2, and their ilk are so mind numbingly EASY that it is truly a joke to say they require "skill." WoW doesn't even have a death penalty for crying out loud. Death is MEANINGLESS.
The reason RMT has taken off is specifically and directly because too many graphical MMO developers have created games that beg for it. Too much of the gameplay is a painful, tedious grind, so people who are able to do what they can to avoid the tedium and get to the "good parts."
Now, as a developer, I do not want some third party raking in huge profits off MY game. I would never want RMT taking place in my games. If someone is going to be selling game items, gold, characters, etc. then I want to be the one making that profit.
But to say that these companies are trying to sell you a skill-based experience is just completely erroneous.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | Jan 18, 2006 at 10:13
To Warren Grant:
City of Heroes is *VERY* twinkable.
Influence/Infamy allows you to buy top end enhancements instantly, whereas a normal character would have to wait many levels before they could have a full set of "SOs". For those of you who have not played the game, 3 damage SOs in an attack power is a +100% boost in damage. Sorry Warren, but being able to get +100% damage to your abilities the instant those SOs become available is a pretty significant example of twinking.
Furthermore, City of Heroes is quite possibly the easiest MMO I have ever played (its a tough call between it and WoW- with WoW's total lack of a death penalty making it a real Clash of the Titans). So there is no doubt that CoH/CoV are not "skill based" games. They are pure time/grind based games just like every other current graphical MMO. It is fun (I actually started playing it again recently), but it is not skill based and it is very easy to twink friends or alts. Furthermore, IGE has a very healthy listing of influence and characters for sale for all the CoH servers.
> most people I have met seem to want to gain
> every advantage possible, tilt the playing
> field as much as possible their way, and win
> at all costs - including buying the right items,
> PLing services or whatever if needs be in some
> cases, solely for the sake of always winning.
I agree, but I also fault the developers. They created a situation where people believe they have to do these things if they want to compete.
> I would have thought that playing sports in
> school, watching sports teams compete etc would
> have inculcated some sense of sportsmanship
Great analogy actually. The whole phenomenon is very similar to steroid abuse in pro sports. People start to think they have to use RMT/steroids just to stay even.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | Jan 18, 2006 at 10:38
> Edward Castronova wrote:
> How many players know that RMT is why they
> have to grind gold so much? How many know that
> RMT is why so many uber items can only be
> obtained by raiding? How many know that RMT
> is why powergamer culture dominates?
With all due respect, the reason "the powergamer culture dominates", the reason why "uber items can only be obtained by raiding", and the reason they "have to grind gold so much" is because nearly every current graphical MMO is designed VERY POORLY.
They are pure grind games. They are skinner boxes that are really little more than "press button, get loot."
Until the developers decide to make the gameplay require more than just an obscene time investment, you will continue to have all the negative aspects you lament.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | Jan 18, 2006 at 10:51
Perhaps one reason that MMOs do not sell you a strictly skill based experience is because far less people would play, especially if said skill based experience placed you directly in competition with other players. Direct meritocracy in a MMO would probably not fly right now. My reasoning here is that it would be a stark and obvious barrier between players, one that constantly reared up to discourage those "less skilled". Developers want a broad playerbase right? If the game is a meritocracy, those with the most time to develop the skills will triumph. And if there is no competition / PC interaction then its probably not a MMO game.
Besides, a "skill" based game would have to be utterly and perfectly balanced in every way, or "those more skilled" would just "break" the rules. Gamers are good at that.
Posted by: Lanky | Jan 18, 2006 at 10:52
More on this in a tick, but for those who want to read about Greg Vederman's decision, Next-Gen has an interview piece with him.
Posted by: Dan Hunter | Jan 18, 2006 at 11:59
< Influence/Infamy allows you to buy top end enhancements instantly, whereas a normal character would have to wait many levels before they could have a full set of "SOs". >
Actually if you solo on the street, rather than grouping and or doing missions the enhance drops are about 5x better, allowing you to have full SOs only one level after they are available. To me this is just poor game design as it forces people to choose between better exp ( grouping ) or better influence.
Here I have to disagree as well. Certainly you can clip along gainging relatively fast experience in CoH with little or no challenge, but you can also choose to find challenges, and make it a game of skill. That many people don't doesn't mean that it isn't available, just that it isn't always utilized.
Sorry to hi-jack the thread on this somwhat off topic response.
Posted by: Sweetmeat | Jan 18, 2006 at 12:17
Hmm for some reason above, my second paste didn't take.
< Furthermore, City of Heroes is quite possibly the easiest MMO I have ever played (its a tough call between it and WoW- with WoW's total lack of a death penalty making it a real Clash of the Titans). So there is no doubt that CoH/CoV are not "skill based" games. >
Should have been before my second rebuttal, but isn't :(
Posted by: Sweetmeat | Jan 18, 2006 at 12:22
Just so I'm clear,
Those ideologically opposed to RMT in MMOs desire:
* An experience in which players are prevented from employing exogenous means, but for skill and time.
* A broad appeal to players, which means that use of skill as a discriminator is limited, leaving only time as a discriminator. (This is why the "Tennis Analogies" fail. Comparing professional sports to recreational sports would be more telling, in which access to training, time for training, and money for equipment do make a dramatic difference in outcomes.)
* Commercial viability in the form of profit for the game publisher. After all, a smaller, non-profit MMO could always be administered in such a manner so as to reduce or effectively eliminate RMT, much as MUDs of days past.
* Create a player experience which, by invoking the above, tasks a widely diverse player base with universally agreeing on an alternate definition of fairness and competition.
So the only substantive response is "it violates the EULA". Apparently we're not interested in actually determining if the EULA provisions vis-a-vis RMT are legally enforcable, we just think the assertion is sufficient.
I'm sorry that I fail to understand why people pine for an essentially single-player experience in a multi-player world. There are even plenty of multiplayer online alternatives which favor skill or are limited to hobbiests and enthusiasts, they just don't happen to be the pervasive commercial MMOs.
Posted by: randolfe_ | Jan 18, 2006 at 13:18
Sweetmeat wrote:
The point that I believe is being made by those who claim "X isn't a game of skill" is that the game doesn't require skill to achieve the goals in question.
If there is a path to achieve the same end which does not force the player to use skill (skill as a gating mechanism), then possession of the goal (uber-equipment, high level, etc) does not serve as a distinguishing factor between the skillful player and the non-skillful.
The tokens of success are no longer signifiers in that case... and I believe this is why many people moan about RMT. They want their virtual trophies that they garnered through the application of skill/diligence to not be diluted by others having the same tokens in a "unearned" fashion. They call that cheating.
That's why you'll see folks like Richard Bartle equate RMT with purchasing a world record in some competitive sport. Richard's correct in one sense... making an achievement token alienable (where you could sell it and the recipient gains the same benefit that they would have had if they had actually achieved it themselves) destroys the ability of others to distinguish between a true achievement token and a fake one.
Where I part company with Richard is that I believe he fails to recognize that we're talking about games where the infrastructure is designed to allow character power to be alienable... where people can gift each other competitive advantages (in some cases huge advantages) and achievement tokens without actually having earned them.
A design such as this cannot be expected to preserve meaning for achievement tokens, and certainly not once the player base is above "tribe" size (roughly 150 players or so).
Once the game is large enough that there is room for "strangers", you can no longer distinguish meaningfully between real achievement tokens and fake ones... unless, of course, you explicitly design it that way.
Implement a "scarlet letter" character history function, for instance. If you allow players to gift powerful items or disproportionate currency amounts to each other, flag those transactions and allow others to view them when they examine the character.
Then when you view a character with cool gear and incredible trophies, you can see for yourself that 90% of his stuff was gifted to him. You can dismiss and jeer his "accomplishments" as (accurately) being fake. He's a trust-fund baby, a silver-spoon warrior.
Those who earn their accomplishments through overcoming challenges (instead of gifts) can rightfully boast, and have the game validate that the avatar's achievements are "real".
Richard has discussed mechanisms here before to help constrain the excessive sharing/trade of accounts, in order to address powerleveling and account sales.
It's fundamentally a design question: do you want to preserve the significance of achievement tokens as distinguishing factors... as signifiers of true accomplishment?
If so, you need to code for that (if you expect a large game audience to interface together). Doing so will likely "freeze out" many who lack the skill/ability to actually accomplish the goal, though... so there are going to be plenty of rent-paying consumers who will be unhappy that they can't easily fake it.
If you want to appeal to those players (and the cash they represent), then you'll code as most of today's mainstream MMOs have coded... where the weak can find a way to fake it and gain unearned fame/glory. Keep in mind that the cash from a weak player spends as well as that of a good player... and there are a lot more weak ones.
If you choose to go for "mass appeal" via that route (everyone's special... which means that no one is), then I think it's a little disingenuous to complain that people are faking it and "ruining the game" using cash (RMT) instead of faking it and ruining the game using popularity (twinking) as their lever for gaining unearned advantages.
Posted by: Barry Kearns | Jan 18, 2006 at 14:17
>City of Heroes is *VERY* twinkable.
>Influence/Infamy allows you to buy top end >enhancements instantly, whereas a normal character >would have to wait many levels before they could have >a full set of "SOs". For those of you who have not >played the game, 3 damage SOs in an attack power is a >+100% boost in damage. Sorry Warren, but being able >to get +100% damage to your abilities the instant >those SOs become available is a pretty significant >example of twinking.
You are grossly simplifying the mechanics here. I acknowledged that you can engage in Twinking of a character via passing them influence or the actual enhancements, but there are many checks to the system to prevent huge imbalances, and you have glossed over those. To give a rough idea of the numbers:
* There is a system of diminishing returns in the game now - although it was added recently I admit - that ensures that multiple enhancements of the same type provide diminishing returns. This system is designed such that using more than 3 enhancements of the same type in a given power is not really cost effective.
* Enhancements are divided into 3 types (Training, Dual Origin and Single Origin) that provide increasing benefits but are limited by character level.
* Training Enhancements provide between 5% or 8.3% each (usable by any character level), Dual Origins provide 10% or 16.7% benefit increase(level 12 or higher only), and Single Origins provide 20% or 33.3% (level 22 or higher only).
* Enhancements must be equal to your current level to provide these values, and can still function at up to 2 levels below your character level or be boosted up to 2 levels above your level, providing an additional range of -4% to +4% (1-2% level difference per + or minus).
* You are engaged in continuously updating these enhancements as your character progresses, but they do drop and can easily be stacked as well as purchased.
* Enhancements require slots to place them in and as these are rewards you receive during leveling, at lower levels you seldom have many slots attached to your various powers.
In early stages you lack the influence to purchase the enhancements you need, and at this point Twinking is certainly a viable strategy, I don't deny that. However the number of slots and the benefit they can provide is severely limited as you progress up in levels. So at levels 1-11 the most benefit you might see is an increase of roughly 30% in damage as a Twinked character using ++s, versus the 24% benefit a non-twinked character using just 3 enhancements of the given type without the pluses might have. That 6% improvement is hardly noticeable in most cases, and this holds true at higher levels as well. As well at those higher levels (ie 35+) you generally have so much influence that affording the enhancements you desire is hardly difficult (one of my wife's COH characters has 15m extra influence she cannot spend currently).
So while you *can* Twink a character, the results at lower levels is not that massive a difference, and the increases in power effectiveness across the board are a calculated part of character progression. My point in providing all the numbers is just to show that the system has been deliberately designed to avoid making character Twinking have a massive difference. I don't deny it goes on, and I don't deny that even the 6% improvements overall can make a difference in character gameplay, but its not the extreme differences that have been present in many previous games (EQ, DAOC, SWG) etc where twinking overpowered items can make a massive difference in character performance, survivability, and PvP capability.
>Furthermore, City of Heroes is quite possibly the >easiest MMO I have ever played (its a tough call >between it and WoW- with WoW's total lack of a death >penalty making it a real Clash of the Titans). So >there is no doubt that CoH/CoV are not "skill based" >games. They are pure time/grind based games just like >every other current graphical MMO. It is fun (I >actually started playing it again recently), but it >is not skill based and it is very easy to twink >friends or alts. Furthermore, IGE has a very healthy >listing of influence and characters for sale for all >the CoH servers.
Well, IGE may list the influence, and it may sell, but I bet thats primarily to people who are just getting started and want a headstart on gameplay, its convenience and nothing more. I would imagine they get sales from people who also *expect* that influence would be more desirable and valuable than it is. Certainly I have never talked a player who doesn't laugh at the concept of paying real cash to buy influence.
As for the ease of the game, thats your perception. I don't deny I found WOW laughably easy and grew bored with it inside of the free month. With COH or COV though a grouped mission of 4-8 people with the mission difficulty slider pushed to the maximum setting can be extremely difficult and challenging. At higher levels and using FOTM class combinations with all the exploits like Dumpster diving I am sure that the game can seem easy I suppose, but with my guild of RL friends I have had more complex, taxing and enjoyable fights in COH/COV than in any other MMORPG I have tried to date. We don't engage in exploits, and we often make our character design decisions for Roleplaying reasons as well rather than picking the current FOTM. The Mission difficulty slider was a massive improvement to the game in that regard. Prior to that it was relatively easy in many cases I agree.
Posted by: Warren Grant | Jan 18, 2006 at 16:17
My response was basically, that if I start a for-pay warez site, it's OK to advertise that with his magazine too, because I think I should be allowed to do it. It didn't go over well.
I'm not sure this is a proper comparison. Copyright infringement is on the books as being against the law, with all sorts of legal precedent.
When it comes to IGE, as far as I know they haven't been successfully sued. Until this happens, I have a hard time accepting what it does is illegal. To prove this, wouldn't a company would have to put its TOS and EULA through close legal scrutiny? If this happened, they would likely crumble like the house of cards they are, at least according to most of my legal-minded friends.
Now, whether or not it's moral is an entirely different issue. PC Gamer is dumping the ads based on the morality of the issue, not the legality. And they're grandstanding; CGW dropped IGE's ads over a year ago. They didn't feel any compulsion to write editorials about it, though.
Posted by: steve | Jan 18, 2006 at 16:26
I think it is ridiculous to complain about gold-farming. In computer games, the rules are effectively defined by the coding, except for rules relating to player communications (sexual harrassment, etc., are impossible to prevent by coding). Gold farmers are taking advantage of a coded game feature. Complaining about the practice is like whining about PvP play on a PvP-permitting server. The very design of WoW and many other MMOGs is what elicits gold-farming behavior. If you don't want it in your game, as a game designer, you just have to design a game without gold. Simple as that.
Alternately, what you have is a strong interest in online gaming from a diverse and growing community of players--Chinese people. Why not harness this behavior for the good of the game? Build features that take advantage of the behavior to entertain everyone. For instance, create an ascetic class that shuns gold and use the natural cultural divide between them and professional gold-farmers to foster bitter faction wars between greedy gold-farming chars and holier-than-thou ascetic monks.
Posted by: Zeke | Jan 18, 2006 at 18:15
Zeke wrote:
I think it is ridiculous to complain about gold-farming. In computer games, the rules are effectively defined by the coding, except for rules relating to player communications (sexual harrassment, etc., are impossible to prevent by coding). Gold farmers are taking advantage of a coded game feature. Complaining about the practice is like whining about PvP play on a PvP-permitting server. The very design of WoW and many other MMOGs is what elicits gold-farming behavior. If you don't want it in your game, as a game designer, you just have to design a game without gold. Simple as that.
What you're missing here is that free-form communication is a designed system. The designed system permits for sexual harassment. The designers could simply disable free-form communication to prevent most sexual harassment (as has been done in more than one MMO), but that particular cure is worse than the affliction itself.
Perhaps it is similar with gold farming, at least in the view of said developers.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 18, 2006 at 18:47
Castronova wrote:
"How many players know that RMT is why they have to grind gold so much? How many know that RMT is why so many uber items can only be obtained by raiding? How many know that RMT is why powergamer culture dominates?"
All of that is total nonsense. If i buy gold its going to be because i want an epic mount. The price of the epic mount is set by blizzard regardless of gold farmers or RMT. (Conversely the price has descreased since the start of the game). The game is designed from the ground up to be a grind. A long arduous grind that ticks over the subscription months. It has not become a grind or been designed as a grind in response to external money transfers.
Posted by: | Jan 18, 2006 at 22:20
Castronova wrote:
"How many players know that RMT is why they have to grind gold so much? How many know that RMT is why so many uber items can only be obtained by raiding? How many know that RMT is why powergamer culture dominates?"
There is yet to be an MMO created which sufficiently emulates macro and micro-economic functions to a degree where your statement would be true. As was just pointed out, the game designers set prices, not the 'market', be it an internal or external market. Correction, the external market prices items because the internal market fails to do so.
In-game systems of trade and auction are not sufficient, so spare the arguments to that effect. When I come across an MMO where all but pure staple items are limited by a production function, and prices are set by demand, then I'll believe Mr. Castronova's arguments. For now, the in game economies are nothing more than automatically renewing production-bots with some designer acting as a central planning agency. I don't need to invoke the failures of real-world central planning when it comes to price functions and the spontaneous development of "alternate markets".
Posted by: randolfe_ | Jan 19, 2006 at 00:01
Wanderer>Matt, where do you get your figures on only 30% of players disapprove of RMT? And if 70% of the players are in favor of it
It's not so black and white.
The figure of 30% is in line with what SOE say is returned in the questionnaires they ask their users. About a third are in favour of RMT and a third are against it. The remainder don't care either way. It's not, therefore, that 70% of the players are in favour of it; rather, it's that 70% aren't against it.
This is SOE's userbase, though. Other virtual worlds have different figures. Nick Yee's Daedalus Project came up with a figure of 22% as the proportion of people who have actually bought gold.
>why do Sony's "Station Exchange" server seem to be struggling, rather than becoming the dominant part of EQ2?
Because for many people, part of the thing about RMT is that people mustn't know you've done it. If you play on a non-RMT server, does that mean you're not going to buy gold? Of course not! You'll buy gold just the same as you always did, just that now people will be slightly less likely to believe you've done it because "why aren't you playing on the RMT servers?".
An interesting approach to this issue would be to open up all transactions between players to scrutiny from other players. In virtual worlds where there is shame in RMT, the sudden arrival of 500GP in your bank account would be seen by guildmates and those who you're looking to group with, and thus everyone would know your gains were ill-gotten.
Of course, if people found out that most RMTers are decent sorts who are desperate to feel wanted and deserve our every sympathy, who knows? Maybe it might make the practice of buying gold respectable. It really depends on the culture of the virtual world.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 19, 2006 at 04:25
Barry Kearns>Where I part company with Richard is that I believe he fails to recognize that we're talking about games where the infrastructure is designed to allow character power to be alienable...
No, where we part company is that you say that the infrastructure is designer to allow it, whereas I say that the design of the infrastructure allows it.
Your point of view says that cars are designed to crash. Mine says that the design of cars allows them to crash. There's no intent on car designers' part to have cars crash, and there's no intent on virtual world designers' part to have twinking or RMT. The fact that it's possible doesn't mean it's designed to be possible.
>A design such as this cannot be expected to preserve meaning for achievement tokens, and certainly not once the player base is above "tribe" size (roughly 150 players or so).
The "design" of soccer allows for goalkeepers to dive the wrong way and fail to save a shot. Should we wring our hands in anguish and say we can't do anything about it when one of them dives the wrong way in an important match and receives a pay-off from a betting syndicate? No, we take them to court over it.
You're confusing the game rules with the game physics. The game physics "allow" RMT and twinking, but the game rules disallow RMT (and could, if the developers wanted, disallow twinking, too). Game designers could change the physics to disallow RMT, but that would also prevent some other activities they see as important. Instead, therefore, they keep the physics as it is but ban the practice of RMT.
When people sign up to a game, they not unreasonably expect that everyone will play by the rules. The rules are not what an implementation "allows" (ie. the physics of the world - the "rules of nature") but the rules of the game. These have the laws of physics as a subset, but they go beyond this. If the rules of the game forbid RMT but not twinking, well, people who don't like those rules shouldn't play the game. If they do play the game, they should be banned as soon as they're detected. This applies to those who buy as well as to those who sell - they're both breaking the rules of play.
If the rules of play allow RMT or twinking, fine, no problem.
>Once the game is large enough that there is room for "strangers", you can no longer distinguish meaningfully between real achievement tokens and fake ones... unless, of course, you explicitly design it that way.
I agree that the problems only really arise once a virtual world exceeds hamlet size, but I don't concede that it's somehow the designer's fault that they've not addressed the issue in code. They shouldn't have to design it in code. If I walk up to a painting in an art gallery and throw ink at it, I can't say "well the artist should have put it behind glass if they didn't want people to throw ink at it" and hope to get away with it. Likewise, just because people can break the rules of the game, that doesn't make it the designer's fault.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 19, 2006 at 04:50
If I walk up to a painting in an art gallery and throw ink at it, I can't say "well the artist should have put it behind glass if they didn't want people to throw ink at it" and hope to get away with it. Likewise, just because people can break the rules of the game, that doesn't make it the designer's fault.
While it may never be your fault that someone threw ink at your painting, if some number of people were running around galleries throwing ink at paintings around the world, wouldn't it be wise of you to consider putting your painting behind glass? And with that much warning, shouldn't you accept some of the blame?
Posted by: steve | Jan 19, 2006 at 09:57
Senior management at MMOs understand that putting value on time spent makes there games valuable.
Why do you think WoW added a scripting language to their UI? Why do you think EQ did station exchange?
The key is to walk the fine line to build a world where the enjoyment of the players isn't ruined by those who are in it purely for financial gain.
Posted by: blaze | Jan 19, 2006 at 11:13
Richard Bartle:
If I walk up to a painting in an art gallery and throw ink at it, I can't say "well the artist should have put it behind glass if they didn't want people to throw ink at it" and hope to get away with it. Likewise, just because people can break the rules of the game, that doesn't make it the designer's fault.
Many painters inspecting a painting like to feel the texture of a painting, many art galleries put their paintings behind glass, and it is entirely subjective as to whether ink splotches improve or detract from the original work. I can allow that it may not be something the original artist of the work should have to concern themselves with, but whoever owns the painting certainly should.
If the designer does not wish something to occur, the designer needs to put into place a rule that restricts 100% of the players from doing it. Anything else is a compromise that will leave both designer and playerbase unsatisfied. I thought it was a generally-held systems design tenet that you end up with a much more flexible system if you design with the intention of preventing behavior you do not want to allow so that you can describe the behavior you want to allow in more generic, flexible terms.
It sounds like you expect all your players to play nicely and behave themselves, yet don't believe this expectation to be valid, and so are setting yourself up for failure, as everyone can see Blizzard has done with RMT, and to a lesser extent twinking.
I am of the opinion that if twinking hurts your game, your game design is flawed. If RMT hurts your game, your game design is flawed. If players think something hurts your game, well, there's a reason they're playing and not designing and it's up to the designer to weed out valid and invalid criticisms of their system.
I guess steve kind of beat me to the punch here.
Posted by: gazarsgo | Jan 19, 2006 at 11:28
The most troubling impact of gold-farming on me is not economic--where most of this discussion is centered--but the decline in the already dubious quality of the play experience. For that reason alone developers should be very concerned of the harm RMT inflicts.
Inflation is rampant on my WoW server. It has nothing to do with the price of mounts, or any other price set by Blizzard. Obviously it occurs in the Auction House where only those who buy gold can hope to afford the highest ticket items. The prices harm the player experience.
There are the spam whispers directing players to RMT sites from "players" with clever names like ytgxcz; and gold buying messages in the mailbox.
A small irritation, but it adds to the unpleasantness.
But there is a much more damaging phenomenon that seems to be growing expoentially.
When I began playing WoW months ago I could get a quest to go kill elementals in Felwood and reasonably expect to find some to kill. Now as I level a second character I find there are farmers perched on the two islands and on the shore near the spawn points. They use instant attacks to immediately claim the spawn. And this is true of many spawns where the designed gameplay and farmers collide.
Now you could argue that since I have an instant long range attack that I should simply beat them at their own game. Healthy competition and all that. But that isn't the game I want to play and it isn't the game the developers designed.
This harkens back to fighting over spawns in EQ, kill-stealing, training, all aspects of the play experience WoW has tried hard to avoid. Organized crews of farmers will do everything they can to drive me away. Tactics such as gaining aggro, then dropping it while on top of a rival player; space-raping (deliberately occupying the same space as another player, jumping etc. to hinder their view or to simply harrass); spamming text to harrass, etc. are effective because they ruin the rival player's game play experience.
People used to create instant, temporary PUGs with strangers to help each other complete quests. Cooperation was easy and enjoyable. Now the farmers ignore my requests for cooperation, slow down my advancement in the game and cause unecessary stress.
Sure, economics are behind their actions, but the real impact of farmers is not to my virtual wallet (even though there is still no epic mount here!), but to part of the game that I found somewhat challenging and interesting beyond the rewards of loot and advancement. I need that something extra. Otherwise I might as well just rent a slot machine by the month instead.
Lee
Posted by: Lee Sheldon | Jan 19, 2006 at 12:49
I agree with Blaze, I won't fancy to glance at a game that states up front my time is going to be wasted, either because it prohibits RMT or isn't designed in a way that allows me to create value. I'll watch a movie or CNN if I need to do that. We've had the benefit in the past of having fun and making money at the same time - what player would give that up - save the virtual liberals clamoring for virtual equity? Isn't that their core complaint? "You MUST waste your time as I do, despite ourselves?"
A marketless game is a valueless game, and a chimera that developers shouldn't be chasing. Players want opportunity. I can't emphasize this enough. They don't want the company playing Big Brother, stomping the entrepreneurs, and they don't want the company whoring out the currency themselves either. This is something SOE doesn't entirely grasp. The secondary market must be protected and tolerated, but not condoned, or in collusion with, the company. I am probably the only one who thinks a spontaneous, uncontrolled emergence of player driven value is a healthy thing for a game.
Posted by: Mithra | Jan 19, 2006 at 13:54
Richard Bartle wrote:
I disagree on almost every front. I'm not saying that cars are designed to crash, nor do I consider that a strong analogy to the current situation with respect to the difference between the treatments of twinking and RMT.
There are two separate issues here. One is whether your game permits transfers of player power. The other is differential enforcement of player motivations for those transfers.
I further strongly disgree with the "no intent to have twinking or RMT" assertion. I consider it naive at best (and more likely disingenuous) to assert that anyone designing an MMO in the post-UO era doesn't recognize that if your design both permits and explicitly codes for the ability of players to transfer power without coded constraint, they will tend to transfer power.
Therefore, if I opt to allow transfers of power between players which give competitive advantages, without game-physics (code-enforced) constraints, I should acknowledge that I accept that players are going to do so. Writing the code to allow that transfer is an intentional act on my part as a designer/implementer, and if I fail to do bounds-checking or implement any constraints, it is a natural consequence of my design decisions if players use that to their advantage.
It's not substantially different from coding to make player characters attackable by other player characters (PvP and PK). If I design a game that permits player characters to attack and kill one another, I can't just claim "I had no intent to allow PvP and PK in my game"... at least not if I'm being intellectually honest.
Coding in a manner that implements that behavior is a conscious act with already known consequences from previous games.
Here we get into the differential enforcement aspect, and the reason for my pointing this out to begin with...
What annoys me the most about all of this is the hue and cry that RMT "ruins the game" and wrecks the competitive landscape, but no corresponding outcry for twinking. I'm talking about environments where abusive twinkers get huge advantages and no penalties, yet RMT players who get the same or less competitive advantage get virtual death sentences (permabans).
If high-level player A gifts 1000 gold pieces to low-level player B, and that transfer gives B huge advantages over other players who don't get similar gifts, then the competitive landscape of the game has been wrecked, IMO.
It is utterly disingenuous to say that it's OK for player B to wreck the landscape if A gave the gift out of love or friendship, but ruining the game if A gave the gift in exchange for some other benefit, like profit.
I find it hypocritical for designers to code a player trade function, applaud a grossly unbalanced in-game transaction using that system, and then turn around and condemn an identical in-game transaction if the player did it for the wrong motivation.
I believe it is possible to set up inappropriate rules for a game... rules which make the game fundamentally "unfair" to certain participants.
I consider game rules which attempt to differentially punish players based on a player's motivation for performing an in-game action to be especially pernicious, and in my view such rules are, in general, fundamentally immoral and unjust.
In general, for the rule to be fair, the in-game action should be either allowed or disallowed, without reference to why a player performs the action.
Consider design-flaw exploits, like zone boundaries or pathing errors. I see no problem with a rule that says "Players are not allowed to attack from atop city entrance archways, due to pathing/targeting errors. Doing so is a bannable offense".
That's a much closer example of an analogy to twinking/RMT. It's a competitive advantage, it's something that the game physics allows, and something that players want to do.
Such a rule appropriately constrains physically-allowed actions, and addresses only the in-game actions. Everyone is on the same footing, and there are no references to player motivations.
Now, what's a closer analogy to the anti-RMT rules that we see today? "Players who take advantage of pathing/targeting errors as part of a cross-guild dispute will be banned"... and no other banning for exploits of the pathing/targeting errors. Such a rule inappropriately punishes only those players who are in guilds, and gives unguilded players an unfair advantage by allowing them to exploit the flaw. It's an unfair rule.
Richard has used the "If you don't like that rule, leave" excuse innumerable times, but I don't see that excuse as redeeming at all. If the rules are unfair, choosing not to play doesn't somehow make them fair.
I have no problem ignoring a fundamentally unfair and inappropriate "rule", which references things which are (frankly) none of a game-operator's business (my personal motivations or financial dealings).
A closer analogy would be complaining and ejecting people from the gallery who throw ink on the paintings for amusement, while simultaneously giving little more than a solemn nod to other folks who are also throwing identical amounts of ink on paintings, but who are doing so to make a political statement or because they find the painting's content offensive.
If you want to throw people out for defacing paintings, fine... but don't make a "rule" that defacement is just fine for one motivation and identical defacement is heinously criminal for another motivation. Enforce the rule based on the in-gallery behavior, not the motivation for that behavior.
A "feature" doesn't become an "exploit" because of a person's motivation, and vice-versa.
If you want to be intellectually honest and stop the behaviors of people who do things for reasons you don't like, the appropriate way to do that (IMO) is to forfeit the ability for everyone to do those same things, regardless of why.
Otherwise, you're implementing something little different than thought-crimes.
That's why I referenced coded solutions... they implement that forfeiture uniformly, instead of the wink-and-a-nod differential enforcement that we tend to see from GMs who enforce their personal views unequally across the player base.
If there were a long history of other art galleries having thousands of patrons regularly throwing ink on their paintings, it would be disingenuous to claim that you didn't anticipate that people would throw ink on paintings in yours, too... and morally vacuous IMO to fail to implement safeguards against ink-throwing because you think it's a "feature" when paintings you happen to dislike are defaced for political reasons.
Posted by: Barry Kearns | Jan 19, 2006 at 14:35
Richard Bartle wrote:
It's not so black and white.
The figure of 30% is in line with what SOE say is returned in the questionnaires they ask their users. About a third are in favour of RMT and a third are against it. The remainder don't care either way. It's not, therefore, that 70% of the players are in favour of it; rather, it's that 70% aren't against it. This is SOE's userbase, though. Other virtual worlds have different figures. Nick Yee's Daedalus Project came up with a figure of 22% as the proportion of people who have actually bought gold.
That's only one of the surveys I was referring to. Both Nick Yee and SOE's surveys have a problem insofar as they are opt-in surveys, to my knowledge. The second survey (I wasn't aware of Nick's) I referred to was commissioned to be carried out by a third party agency whose mission is running surveys, and was carried out across major MMOs rather than a single MMO.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 19, 2006 at 14:39
"Inflation is rampant on my WoW server. It has nothing to do with the price of mounts, or any other price set by Blizzard. Obviously it occurs in the Auction House where only those who buy gold can hope to afford the highest ticket items. The prices harm the player experience."
I dont agree with this at all. You need to give examples then we can establish the worth. Check the prices against http://wow.allakhazam.com/ to see what the median price of the item is.
Also alot of people are mentioning twinking, it might be worth noting that Blizzard now offically endorse it as a means of extending the life of the game. See the end of the high-end content guide:
"Now that you've powered up one character up to level 60, perhaps it's time to try out another class! It's much easier the next time around, as you now know where you're going and where to find quests and adventure. You can also spend some money to equip your low level character with powerful weapons and equipment to give yourself an edge."
http://worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/highleveloptions.html
Posted by: Jhonus | Jan 19, 2006 at 15:25
Blizzard has a interesting history of saying things about their games and then realizing that they really dont want it that way. Recently they anounced the end of out-of-combat rezzing as it was considered borderline exploitational and trivialized encounters. Ironically, their endgame raiding content had the practice listed as a "good idea" for encounters in MC and onwards.
Oops?
Posted by: Lanky | Jan 19, 2006 at 16:14
steve>if some number of people were running around galleries throwing ink at paintings around the world, wouldn't it be wise of you to consider putting your painting behind glass?
It might be wise, but I shouldn't have to do it. The Mona Lisa is behind bullet-proof glass so that crazy people can't damage it, but non-crazy people can't appreciate it as well because of the glass.
>And with that much warning, shouldn't you accept some of the blame?
This is like saying that people should accept some of the blame for getting mugged when they walk down a dark alley, or that they should accept some of the blame for getting sexually assaulted for wearing provocative clothing.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 20, 2006 at 08:59
gazarsgo>If the designer does not wish something to occur, the designer needs to put into place a rule that restricts 100% of the players from doing it.
Yes, although of course the designer has no hope of doing this any more than real life authorities do. There's a real-life rule to restrict murder, but it's not 100% effective.
Designers have some advantage, in that they can change the code to match some of their rules, but code isn't always the answer. The designer may wish to prevent people from making lewd sexual innuendoes, but has no way of actually preventing it happening in code. All that can be done is to punish people found to have done it.
>Anything else is a compromise that will leave both designer and playerbase unsatisfied.
But to various degrees. People may be dissatisfied that people are murdered in real life, but they'd be more dissatisfied if more people were murdered. If a designer can't stop something, that doesn't mean it should be allowed: people may be unsatisfied at the compromise, but much less unsatisfied than if the designer went all laissez-faire over it.
>I thought it was a generally-held systems design tenet that you end up with a much more flexible system if you design with the intention of preventing behavior you do not want to allow so that you can describe the behavior you want to allow in more generic, flexible terms.
What do you mean "flexible system"?
Look, RMT (and twinking) occur because of the game aspect of virtual worlds. Games aren't like regular pieces of software engineering. What happens in games is that people willingly agree to give up some freedom (ie. to play by the rules) in order to gain some other freedom they didn't have before (eg. to beat people to a senseless pulp).
If I'm playing white in chess, I can't, on my first move, take your king with my queen and announce I've won. Well, actually I can, but it won't be acknowledged by my opponent as it's against the rules. Now is chess designed with the intention of preventing my taking a king with a queen on move one? No, it's not - it's just as easy for me to do that as it is for me to do P-K4. The point is, when I agreed to play chess I agreed to play by the rules. The rules say I can't do it, so I don't. The rules say I can't move twice in a row, so I don't. The rules say my bishop can't resurrect my dead knight, so I don't do it. All these are things which the chess system could prevent - indeed, computerised versions do prevent them. Chess clearly was not designed with the intention of stopping this behaviour, y it was played successfully for a thousand or more years without its being a problem. The reason is that, be playing the players agree NOT to do anything against the rules.
If RMT is against the rules, then people who RMT should be thrown out of the game, just as they would be if they insisted on having two moves for every single move their opponent made in chess. It's no use mewling about bad systems methodology: the bug isn't in the game design here, it's in the attitude of those players who won't play by the rules.
>It sounds like you expect all your players to play nicely and behave themselves
I expect the majority to do so, and I expect the minority who don't do so to take it on the chin when I kick them out.
>I am of the opinion that if twinking hurts your game, your game design is flawed.
Well, it depends what you mean by "game design". If I design a game and say, as part of the rules, that twinking isn't allowed, but then it turns out that people do it anyway and it adversely affects gameplay, that's not a failure in the design - it's a failure in the players. If, on the other hand, I say that twinking is allowed and it adversely affects gameplay, OK, that would indeed be a failure in design.
People breaking the rules thereby spoiling the game is not a design failure. A design failure is when people follow the rules but do something that spoils the game.
I'm not a great fan of twinking, but I stand by a designer's right to allow it (as I stand by a designer's right to have RMT if they want).
>If RMT hurts your game, your game design is flawed.
Only if your design allows RMT. If it doesn't allow RMT, your design is not flawed - the players who are playing a game but not following the rules are at fault.
>If players think something hurts your game, well, there's a reason they're playing and not designing and it's up to the designer to weed out valid and invalid criticisms of their system.
Sure, but why isn't banning the people who aren't following the rules allowed as an option here?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 20, 2006 at 09:30
mithra>I won't fancy to glance at a game that states up front my time is going to be wasted, either because it prohibits RMT or isn't designed in a way that allows me to create value.
This is a perfectly valid point of view. There are virtual worlds out there that allow RMT, and you can go and play them if you want to.
The problems lie in the fact that many RMTers go to virtual worlds that don't want RMT and then RMT in them. Where are these non-RMTers to go? Wherever they play, the RMTers can follow. It doesn't matter if a non-RMTer plays an RMT-permitted virtual world, because not engaging in RMT doesn't really affect the experience of those who do engage in it. It does matter when RMTers play in an RMT-forbidden world, because RMT affects the experience of those who don't engage in it.
If all people who held your views played on RMT servers, that would be fine. It's when they come to non-RMT servers and then do RMT anyway and then get indignant about being told to stop that I take issue with them.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 20, 2006 at 09:38
Richard>If all people who held your views played on RMT servers, that would be fine. It's when they come to non-RMT servers and then do RMT anyway and then get indignant about being told to stop that I take issue with them.
Fair enough, but what can you do? As I expressed in another thread, players don't really want a sanctioned RMT space. What they really want to is to cheat, and I use cheat and RMT interchangeably, while simultaneously discouraging others from cheating by virtue of policy. So its not really a situation, in my opinion, that RMT'ers are invading non-RMT spaces, as much as it is RMT'ers themselves who are openly clamoring for the CREATION of these spaces, where they can exlusively prosper in the face of some minimal deterrence to "rule abiding" players. The error you are making, I believe, is to take players at their word when they say they want a thing, when their motivations are in fact, to defy that control. People don't want to compete in an open market, they want to cheat in a closed one. Hell, thats my motivation, I'm self reflective enough to figure that out. Just as the mafia suffers in a white market, and so too do players who wish to secretly leverage their cash for advantage.
OK, case in point. My partner and I were discussing at length the ramification of what Sony has done with Station Exchange and how that affects our business. He was of the opinion that this was good, that we could operately legitimately on the SE enabled servers and not have to worry about bannings, eBay and so forth. The problem I explained, and I believe SOE is in folly here, and he soon came around to realize it too, is that players don't want to play on an RMT sanctioned server. They don't want that stigma. An item on an SE server doesn't have nearly the same WOW factor that it would on a prohibited server. What they want is that standing assumption that they've earned their assets through play. When Sony set aside two servers for SE, it was clear to me that the real secondary market wasn't on those servers, it was on all the rest. I found it laughable their suggestion that this would somehow curb macroing.
As a game admin you're in a pickle really, because the expectation from the players is an obvious contradiction. They expect you to publicly condemn the practice, but not really to do anything about it if it means catching them. This might be an unsatisfying state of affairs, but I can't imagine this being a terribly difficult policy to implement.
Posted by: Mithra | Jan 20, 2006 at 10:26
Barry Kearns>Therefore, if I opt to allow transfers of power between players which give competitive advantages, without game-physics (code-enforced) constraints, I should acknowledge that I accept that players are going to do so.
You can acknowledge that players are going to be able to do so in terms of its being physically possible. That doesn't mean they are going to do it. Plenty of players don't do it. They'd be much happier if the virtual world had no players in it who did do it. Designing a game for these won't-do-it players is perfectly valid. Pretty well all boardgames are designed for people to play consensually, by the rules, and will fall apart if there are players who don't play by the rules.
>Writing the code to allow that transfer is an intentional act on my part as a designer/implementer, and if I fail to do bounds-checking or implement any constraints, it is a natural consequence of my design decisions if players use that to their advantage.
No, because the design ALSO includes the uncodable rules made explicit in the EULA. Those rules (plus other, unwritten rules such as not going up to a player in the same real-life room and real-life tickling them while they're in virtual combat) are part of the design.
Now you can claim, if you like, that these aren't or shouldn't be part of the rules of the virtual world, but that's a different argument.
>If I design a game that permits player characters to attack and kill one another, I can't just claim "I had no intent to allow PvP and PK in my game"... at least not if I'm being intellectually honest.
You can say that anyone who PKs another player's character had better be able to justify their actions to the satisfaction of an administrator or lose their own character as punishment. That's exactly how some small virtual worlds do work, in fact. It's not a solution that scales well, but that's not the issue here.
>Coding in a manner that implements that behavior is a conscious act with already known consequences from previous games.
Yes, but only if you take the same attitude to the enforcement of uncoded rules as did previous developers.
>What annoys me the most about all of this is the hue and cry that RMT "ruins the game" and wrecks the competitive landscape, but no corresponding outcry for twinking.
Yes, I'm well aware of this from our previous discussion in one of TN's longest-ever threads.
If you're against twinking as a permissible behaviour, yes, that's fine. Campaign against it; I have some sympathy with you. Maybe someone will introduce a no-twink rule into their virtual world, or even code it so as to reduce the potential for twinking.
Ultimately, though, it's the designer's design, not yours. If they want to allow twinking and not RMT, that should be their artistic perogative. They may get a worse product as a result, or they may get exactly what they wanted. If you don't like it, OK, well (here it comes again) no-one is making you play.
>If high-level player A gifts 1000 gold pieces to low-level player B, and that transfer gives B huge advantages over other players who don't get similar gifts, then the competitive landscape of the game has been wrecked, IMO.
Yes, you're right, it most probably has. If the designer allows twinking then the designer has to accept responsibility for this.
That is not, however, the same as saying that if the designer has an explicit no-twinking rule and the player makes a gift then it's a design fault. There may be other good reasons to allow players to transfer large amounts of currency to other players, eg. it's a bank loan with some virtual property as collateral. Sure, there are perhaps ways to formalise this, but the point is that if the designer prohibits twinking but some players do it anyway, that's not the fault of the designer, it's the fault of those who twink.
Most games, of course, do allow twinking, although if the war on RMT turns against the practice then who knows, maybe twinking will be stopped too?
>I believe it is possible to set up inappropriate rules for a game... rules which make the game fundamentally "unfair" to certain participants.
It certainly is. Don't play those games.
>In general, for the rule to be fair, the in-game action should be either allowed or disallowed, without reference to why a player performs the action.
I don't think that's the issue. I could have an unfair rule that had no reference as to why a player performs an action (eg. allow one character in 50 to become a Jedi, but you don't find out if your character is in that 2% until you reach level 40). I could also have a fair rule that did make reference to motivation (eg. you're given 3 points a day to award to players for playing well in your opinion, and players who get commended by a large number of different individuals get a discount on NPC purchases).
>Consider design-flaw exploits, like zone boundaries or pathing errors. I see no problem with a rule that says "Players are not allowed to attack from atop city entrance archways, due to pathing/targeting errors. Doing so is a bannable offense".
Yes, that's fair enough. It would even be fair if the description of the reason for the rule were not given (eg. because it leads to a dupe bug that needs to be fixed).
>Now, what's a closer analogy to the anti-RMT rules that we see today? "Players who take advantage of pathing/targeting errors as part of a cross-guild dispute will be banned"... and no other banning for exploits of the pathing/targeting errors. Such a rule inappropriately punishes only those players who are in guilds, and gives unguilded players an unfair advantage by allowing them to exploit the flaw. It's an unfair rule.
Ah, but it may be to balance some other unfair rule in the guild's favour. Sometimes there's a bigger picture.
I should add, of course, that although I'm against unfair rules I do stand by the right of a designer to implement them. The rule may be deliberately unfair, to make some point. ATITD has some rules like this.
>Richard has used the "If you don't like that rule, leave" excuse innumerable times
That's right, and I shall continue to do so.
>but I don't see that excuse as redeeming at all. If the rules are unfair, choosing not to play doesn't somehow make them fair.
That's correct. Breaking them doesn't make them fair, either.
Ultimately, it's not your game, it's the designer's. If the game is unfair, you can appeal for the rules to be changed so it becomes fair, but the designer is under no obligation to listen to you. A wise designer WOULD listen to a well-argued case, but they don't HAVE to listen to it. You have rights too, though: you can leave. If enough people agree with you that the rules are unfair, they'll leave too and the designer will have their perfect game, just with no players.
>I have no problem ignoring a fundamentally unfair and inappropriate "rule", which references things which are (frankly) none of a game-operator's business (my personal motivations or financial dealings).
I trust this does not extend to ignoring similar rules imposed by RL governments, because if it does you'll eventually wind up in jail.
If you feel that a game has a bad rule, DON'T PLAY THAT GAME! Is that so difficult? Why, if you decide that you know better than the designer, would you play the game anyway and ignore the rule? Is it to punish the designer somehow? Is it to punish the other players who don't see things your way and think the rule is fine? Why play a game for which you don't like the rules? I mean, WHY?
>If you want to throw people out for defacing paintings, fine... but don't make a "rule" that defacement is just fine for one motivation and identical defacement is heinously criminal for another motivation.
This is indeed a real-life law in the UK. A famous piece of modern art, Tracy Emin's "My Bed", was famously jumped up and down on in 1999 by a pair of artists known as Mad for Real, claiming that they were producing a new work of art, "Two Artists Jump on Tracy's Bed". They were released without charge, and Tracy had to make (well, re-unmake) her bed again. If they hadn't been artists and had messed the bed up, they would have been charged (or sent for psychiatric testing).
Real-life laws often take motivation into account. If I switched my briefcase with yours by accident and found $50,000 in it which I didn't give back, I could expect a much smaller sentence than if I deliberately switched my briefcase with yours to steal that $50,000.
You may have a problem with laws that take into account motivation, but real-life legislators don't, and I don't see that virtual world designers should have to either.
>A "feature" doesn't become an "exploit" because of a person's motivation, and vice-versa.
Again, you're being too absolutist here. A feature can become an exploit because of the person's motivation. It's a feature to send someone 20 pieces of mail. It's an exploit to send someone 20 pieces of mail because you know that this will fill up their mailbox and then the message they're expecting with 100GP in it will bounce.
>If you want to be intellectually honest and stop the behaviors of people who do things for reasons you don't like, the appropriate way to do that (IMO) is to forfeit the ability for everyone to do those same things, regardless of why.
I want to stop people swearing. I can't stop them swearing in code, but I can stop them speaking. Should I therefore stop everyone speaking, to prevent the few who want to swear from swearing?
What's rather do is allow people to speak, put a profanity filter on overt swearing, and make a rule saying that anyone who uses profanities is going to get banned. I can't ban in code, but I can ban in non-code.
Should I ban someone who says "Cupid Stunt"? Let's suppose that this is a valid profanity, and I determine to do so. What do I do when a player summons a GM and says "So-and-so just called me a cupid stunt"? By your rule - ban! Everyone should forfeit the ability to use that term, regardless of why! By my rule, hey, it's OK, this person wasn't saying it to be profane, quite the opposite in fact.
Motivation does matter.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 20, 2006 at 10:44
Mithra>players don't really want a sanctioned RMT space. What they really want to is to cheat, and I use cheat and RMT interchangeably, while simultaneously discouraging others from cheating by virtue of policy
I agree entirely. SOE's RMT servers are lame because despite the fact that people come up with all these noble reasons for wanting to do RMT legitimately, actually they want to do RMT for the reasons we always knew they did - to appear to have achieved what they haven't achieved.
As for what to do with it, well there are plenty of game design techniques that would reduce it, and if designers want to use them then they're prefectly at liberty to do so.
Of course, if they feel that these would impact too much on gameplay were they implemented in code, all they can do instead is to ban the practice then ban the people caught doing it. Data-mining should be able to identify most farmers fairly easily, it's just whether there's the will to follow through and ban accounts or not.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 20, 2006 at 10:54
This is like saying that people should accept some of the blame for getting mugged when they walk down a dark alley, or that they should accept some of the blame for getting sexually assaulted for wearing provocative clothing.
I knew someone would play the rape card in this example. Of course it's absurd to blame the rape victim, but if we're going to rely on outliers to make our points, it sort of ends the discussion.
On a theoretical level, of course people shouldn't use exploits or buy gold if it's expressly forbidden. And their houses shouldn't get robbed or their cars stolen if they leave them unlocked, and they shouldn't get beaten up in that dark alley.
Within reason, however, and in some specific, non-criminal examples, it's fair to criticize a person for not taking common sense precautionary measures. And that criticism can easily turn into, or be perceived as, "blame" even if it's not overt or intentional. The legal system seems to see some shades of gray in these matters, and as far as I know, civil courts have some allowance for "blaming the victim." (There are also issues of negligence and "ordinary care" that can even come into play in criminal matters.)
But back to games. If I say that a designer should take some blame for creating their games in such a manner that allows exploits or encourages gold farming behavior, it doesn't completely absolve the users of any responsibility for their actions.
Posted by: steve | Jan 20, 2006 at 11:14
Richard>I agree entirely. SOE's RMT servers are lame because despite the fact that people come up with all these noble reasons for wanting to do RMT legitimately, actually they want to do RMT for the reasons we always knew they did - to appear to have achieved what they haven't achieved.
I find this entire thread quite interesting.
I wonder if servers that didn't allow transfers of any sort between accounts (or characters if we wanted to be more extreme) would have fared better than the RMT server experiment.
Posted by: Cherian Mathew | Jan 20, 2006 at 12:49
Richard Bartle wrote:
Exactly. And since I contend that RMT can be accurately expressed as "twinking using different motivators", I conclude that cries of "RMT is ruining the game" are most likely inaccurately targeting the root cause of the problem.
In those situations, the game is being ruined because of the design failure which permits twinking to ruin the game, and those who twink to gain an advantage over those who don't.
Under such a landscape, and in environments significantly larger than tribe size (multi-thousand participants), it is unsurprising that a meaningfully large number of participants will avail themselves of the competitive edge that twinking brings... and those without the extensive social network of high-time-availability comrades will tend to use other levers like cash to achieve the same goal, and thereby attempt to restore competitive balance with the "standard" twinker.
Targeting RMT players but not regular twinkers (by attacking only RMT instead of making the twinking itself the bannable offense) is a case of treating the symptoms, not the root cause.
Posted by: Barry Kearns | Jan 20, 2006 at 13:20
This really isn't a sacrifice for PC Gamer, more a reflection that online advertising is up. They're going to fill that slot with ads either way- they're just being more selective in the client
Posted by: chas | Jan 20, 2006 at 13:27
Previously, by flexible system, I meant an environment in which a player can perform actions not foreseen (or explicitly enabled, if you prefer) by the game's designer. Isn't the ultimate goal for us, in devising game-worlds and in the evolution of MMORPGs, to create a system which can grow and expand beyond our individual imaginings and interventions?
Richard: Sure, but why isn't banning the people who aren't following the rules allowed as an option here?
This is exactly the mentality I am trying to advocate against. If your rule is important, it warrants implementation to enforce it! The board game analogy does not hold because a board game designer does not have control over the interface through which the player interacts with the board game in the same way that a MMORPG designer has control over how their playerbase interacts with their game world.
Maybe most people have a different idea of an ultimate goal regarding gameworld implementations than I do, but my hope is to someday participate in a gameworld that requires little to no administration as far as rules enforcement. It should not matter whether individuals in real life exchange money for access to virtual goods, because it should have no impact on your gameworld as a whole who controls what. A group formed within the game amassing wealth should be indistinguishable from a group formed outside the game amassing wealth. Certainly the entire dynamic of what happens when someone 'gifts' this wealth to someone else is a point of contention, but I find twinking to be indistinguishable from RMT in this regard.
I see two sides to the entire RMT issue, one being the impact on game design and the other being the impact on the playerbase. The playerbase generally fails to recognize the difference between what they think they want and what they really want, while game designers fail to account for the economic dynamics of their world, either through lack of vision or more probably through lack of resources to devote to fleshing out economics in their world -- I certainly do not mean to suggest that this problem has a simple solution, but perhaps I can convince some of you that this problem is no more than the growing pains in the evolution of an idea.
Having reflected a bit more, I think I have to say that those concerned about the inflation of virtual world's economies effect on those who do not participate in RMT have it all backwards... RMT does not hurt the average player, RMT hurts itself! The time invested to generate in-game money becomes worth less as time goes on due to the inflation, as is self-evident by the downward spiral of prices. The more successful a company like IGE is, the less profitable it becomes. I imagine increased volume helps sustain the business model, but I think they would go broke if new environments (or instances of environments) did not come into existence on a regular enough basis.
Ultimately it will come down to whether or not the game designers feel enough pressure to create game worlds with finite resources rather than the infinite resource model they seem to employ near-universally today. It certainly seems like a better solution to scale the amount of wealth (as well as the cost of goods) directly to how many people are on a given server rather than letting a minority group run up inflation to incredible levels.
Posted by: gazarsgo | Jan 20, 2006 at 16:06
This is a repost of my "Slippery Slope" From Twinking to EBay from the KidTrade paper:
Gifting → Twinking
Gifting + Multiple Chars/Server → Muling
Gifting + Messaging + Trust → Trading
Trading – Messaging – Trust + In World Machinery → Robust Trading
Robust Trading + Scarcity + Liquidity → External Market (eBay)
External Market – Trust + In World Machinery → GOM
Posted by: F. Randall Farmer | Jan 20, 2006 at 16:30
That slope is mountinous. ;-)
Posted by: Lanky | Jan 20, 2006 at 16:33
steve>I knew someone would play the rape card in this example.
I didn't play the rape card, I played the sexual assault card.
>Of course it's absurd to blame the rape victim, but if we're going to rely on outliers to make our points, it sort of ends the discussion.
I was extending to its logical conclusion the argument that people are culpable in their wrongful treatment if their behaviour invites such treatment. Of course, sexual assaults are far more serious than RMT, but "severity of wrongful treatment" wasn't one of the criteria in the suggestion that people should be blamed for making life easy for wrong-doers.
>Within reason, however, and in some specific, non-criminal examples, it's fair to criticize a person for not taking common sense precautionary measures.
And hey, lookee here, RMT is the exact situation it fits?
No, you can't say that. It's not a crime for a man to leave his wife and kids for a younger, prettier woman, but it's not exactly right either. If a wife introduces her husband to the woman he leaves her for, is she partly to blame for it? Or isn't this one of the specific, non-criminal examples where she should have taken precautionary measures?
>But back to games. If I say that a designer should take some blame for creating their games in such a manner that allows exploits or encourages gold farming behavior, it doesn't completely absolve the users of any responsibility for their actions.
I agree with you on this, yes.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 21, 2006 at 08:57
Barry Kearns>since I contend that RMT can be accurately expressed as "twinking using different motivators", I conclude that cries of "RMT is ruining the game" are most likely inaccurately targeting the root cause of the problem.
Although there is a large overlap between the effects of twinking and RMT, nevertheless I feel that there are sufficient differences that it's legitimate for a designer to ban one and not ban the other. Of course, that doesn't mean that every time a designer does decide to ban one and not the other the designer is always right; on the other hand, it doesn't mean you're always right, either.
>In those situations, the game is being ruined because of the design failure which permits twinking to ruin the game, and those who twink to gain an advantage over those who don't.
If a game design allows (as in it's not banned by the code or any implicit or explicit rules) twinking, and that twinking ruins the game, then yes, that is a design failure. The same can be said of ANY feature that the designer decides to insert/allow which ruins the game. All you're doing here is defining what a "design failure" is. Twinking isn't always a design failure.
>Under such a landscape, and in environments significantly larger than tribe size (multi-thousand participants), it is unsurprising that a meaningfully large number of participants will avail themselves of the competitive edge that twinking brings...
It's unsurprising, but not inevitable.
>Targeting RMT players but not regular twinkers (by attacking only RMT instead of making the twinking itself the bannable offense) is a case of treating the symptoms, not the root cause.
This is only the case if RMT and twinking are exactly equivalent. They're not exactly equivalent, though. For example, in MUD1 it was possible to reverse-twink, whereby a low-level character would collect a stash of treasure which would be given to their high-level character to score for. Where's the equivalent reverse-RMT?
Incidentally, in MUD1 we called both forms of twinking "looby-looing", and they were both banned. I do see your point about RMT and twinking both being bad things. What I'm trying to say, though, are two things:
1) RMT and twinking aren't identical, and designers should be allowed to have one without the other if they so choose.
2) The game's rules as stated in the EULA are just as much part of the game as the rules in the code, and merely because the code allows something that doesn't mean designers should have to accept players' breaking of the EULA rules.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 21, 2006 at 10:17
gazarsgo>This is exactly the mentality I am trying to advocate against. If your rule is important, it warrants implementation to enforce it!
This is exactly the mentality I am trying to advocate against. Unimplementable rules can also be important.
>The board game analogy does not hold because a board game designer does not have control over the interface through which the player interacts with the board game in the same way that a MMORPG designer has control over how their playerbase interacts with their game world.
Not in the same way, but the board game designer does have control. Example: in chess, the fact that one piece can't physically be in two squares at the same time means that the written rules of chess don't need to say that pieces can't be in two squares at the same time. If, instead of using a board, players wrote down what was in each square then it would indeed be possible to say that the same piece was in more than one square. The interface is an issue for board game designers, too.
>but my hope is to someday participate in a gameworld that requires little to no administration as far as rules enforcement.
The rules that would have to be enforced in code to support this would mean that what you got would not be recognisable as a virtual world. The problem is that much legitimate behaviour would be caught in the same net that stopped illegitimate behaviour.
I'll come back to the example I always come back to here, profanity. How are you ever, ever, going to stop people from saying rude things about other people without completely restricting what they can say at all? You have three options:
1) Permit all speech. Your children who play get sworn at by morons and say "daddy, that man says Jesus was a faggot, what does he mean?".
2) Restrict all speech between people who don't know each other in RL. WoW with Toontown communication would be an entirely different game.
3) Permit all speech except profanity. Filter known profanities, and ban people who find some other way to be verbally obnoxious. You get the same question from junior as in 1), but much, much less often.
If you insist that everything not banned by code is allowed, then you can only go 2). This has a devastating effect on the nature of the virtual world. The same applies to other written rules, too: to code in a solution would be impossible. If code is your only defence, "This person isn't letting me join their guild because in RL I'm black/female/Jewish" swiftly leads to the removal of all guilds, not the removal of that one guild which is being too in-your-face real *ist.
>It should not matter whether individuals in real life exchange money for access to virtual goods, because it should have no impact on your gameworld as a whole who controls what.
Well, OK, outline a mechanism for a virtual world where this is the case, and we'll tell you whether we'd play it or not.
>RMT does not hurt the average player, RMT hurts itself!
Yes, you're right. RMT only works so long as people believe the system isn't entirely corrupt. If they believe that every high-level player they see got where they are through RMT-buying stuff, that completely undermines the achievement hierarchy. If everyone is a king, no-one is a king.
>The time invested to generate in-game money becomes worth less as time goes on due to the inflation, as is self-evident by the downward spiral of prices.
I think it's worth pointing out that inflation can be due to other factors, not just money supply. For example, where do RMTers get the gold they sell people? Unless there's something like a dupe bug, generally they'll get it from obtaining objects and auctioning them. The gold they get from auctioning stuff, they sell back to the player base so people can buy the next batch of objects farmed. This only works if there are people who need the farmed objects. What happens when the demand falls? It won't fall for consumables, but for non-consumables it will as more and more people already have the farmed objects or something better. In order to sell the object, the price has to drop. This leads to inflation, but it's caused by over-supply of objects, not of money.
>I think they would go broke if new environments (or instances of environments) did not come into existence on a regular enough basis.
They could probably continue to sell reagents and stuff, but their business would indeed suffer, you're right.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 21, 2006 at 10:48
I wrote: Targeting RMT players but not regular twinkers (by attacking only RMT instead of making the twinking itself the bannable offense) is a case of treating the symptoms, not the root cause.
Richard bartle replied:
I think we're using the term "twinking" in a different fashion. I use the term to refer to the transfer of unearned net power/rewards between characters (typically to grant either a competitive advantage or the "bragging rights" of false achievement).
Within that context, I don't see how it's possible for any character to "reverse-twink"... if a character actually earned the power/reward, it would be the game giving it to them, not another character. If they didn't earn it, and it grants power or a fake achievement of any kind, it's twinking... not forward, not reverse.
Under such a definition, it's also obvious that that twinking and RMT are not identical. RMT is a subset of twinking in that case, and therefore there is more twinking-in-total than there is RMT. (All RMT is twinking, but not all twinking is RMT.)
To speak to the specific MUD1 scenario, I'd have to know more about the mechanics which led to the behavior in the first place, and what exactly is meant by "given to their high-level character to score for".
What was the advantage in MUD1 of using the low-level character for treasure gathering instead of a high-level one? Did it have something to do with the Tearoom Warlock phenomenon? Was there was a threshold which introduced additional danger to a character if crossed... which motivated players to go up to the line but not cross it, and want to fake the achievement by collecting rewards and then consolidating them on a single character, creating the illusion that the character had exposed himself to more danger than they actually had?
If that's the case, I'd say that particular form of twinking is an artifact of the disincentive for crossing that line. If WoW had an equivalent penalty (one that outweighed the benefit of proceeding past the line), I'm sure you'd see people using RMT to pump up their near-the-line characters, too.
The fundamental problem with this approach, IMO, is that you're creating generally unenforceable rules, and ones that reference player behaviors outside the game. This teaches a fundamental disrespect for the rules, as players see that the vast majority of those who break that rule go unpunished... and also tend to garner significant advantages for their characters by breaking that largely-unenforceable "rule". It encourages players to be scofflaws.
Let me use an analogy that also ties back to something else Richard said:
Consider a scenario where you have an organization that provides facilities for basketball games. They provide the building, the basketball courts, the equipment, uniforms, even referees... all in exchange for a monthly fee. They've also organized a tiered tournament structure, where teams compete on a regular basis for trophies, and a bit of fame through newspaper/TV coverage. There have even been some college/professional scouts seen in the stands!
You've spent several months putting together a good team, and the next tournament round is has just started up.
In the first half of the game, the other team is repeatedly engaging in "charging" and "travelling", which is against the rules of basketball... but the referees refuse to call any charging or travelling penalties. You complain to the referees, but all you receive is a technical foul (a penalty), and the charging/travelling continues. The other team has a significant advantage over your team if you continue to follow the unenforced rules.
Should your team restore parity by playing on the same landscape as your opponents, or just choose to lose?
This is the analogous landscape to twinkers versus straight-up players. Now let's extend it to twinkers versus RMT.
Same scenario, but one of the scouts in the stands has talked to several of the teams, including yours. He's offering full-ride scholarships to your team, but only if you win your game.
Your team now has a different incentive to maximize their chances of winning (than those who the scout hasn't talked to). Teams that received the offer, having seen that the referees continue to call a distorted game by not calling legitimate penalties, engage in travelling and charging too.
Is it ethical for these teams to compete on the same distorted landscape as their opponents, despite having different motivations for doing so?
Now let's complete the analogy. The facility owners saw the result of this happening across a year's worth of tournaments, and have come out with a new "rule":
"Players who repeatedly violate basketball rules on charging and travelling in an attempt to get a scholarship will be ejected from the game, will forfeit all of their prepaid dues, and will be banned from the facility."
Players who continue to do so simply because they say they like to "play hard" are not punished.
I think such a rule is strongly analogous to typical MMO anti-RMT rules... and I think it is a fundamentally unfair and unjust rule.
It was not the offers of scholarships which "ruined the game" in this case... it was the referees allowing players to distort the competitive landscape at will and refusing to enforce penalties equally.
A fair ruling would be to actually enforce the rules of basketball equally, without reference to why the players want to win.
Implementing a rule as I outlined above would simply teach disrespect for rules in general, it would encourage evasion and secrecy (people would meet with scouts more secretly, instead of in the open), and it wouldn't restore the imbalance caused by the original unsportsmanlike conduct.
Well then... in the face of such a rule, why not just quit?
There may be few (if any) equivalent substitutes, and there may already be substantial time/resource investment into this particular scenario. The scouts are hanging out here, not on your neighborhood court. You and your team might also not have access to equivalent facilities anywhere else.
You can walk away and lose both your investment and your opportunities... or you can level the competitive playing field by ignoring the unfair anti-scout rule and take advantage of the same lax enforcement that your opponents use against you, even though that "ruins the game".
I can understand why many wouldn't walk away under that scenario, and I can't say that I'd fault them much, either.
But I don't think it's the scolarships that are ruining that game... and the way to fix it isn't to get more and more draconian about tracking down whether people are talking to scouts.
The way to fix it is to enforce a fair game where the proper in-game rules are in effect and fairly ruled upon, and let people compete fairly regardless of what their motivation is. If you do so, I contend that you'll see excellent basketball being played, and the game will not be ruined even if scholarships are offered.
Posted by: Barry Kearns | Jan 21, 2006 at 13:10
Barry Kearns>I think we're using the term "twinking" in a different fashion. I use the term to refer to the transfer of unearned net power/rewards between characters (typically to grant either a competitive advantage or the "bragging rights" of false achievement).
That sounds like a different way of expressing what I mean by it, too.
>Within that context, I don't see how it's possible for any character to "reverse-twink"... if a character actually earned the power/reward, it would be the game giving it to them, not another character.
What typically happens in twinking is that a high-level character gives stuff to a low-level character. Sometimes, though, the low-level character will give stuff to the high-level one. For example, in WoW you might want a ton of linen to give to the collectors so as to get the badges or whatever they are which you can then use to raise your reputation in a city and get better deals from the NPCs there. You can do this by going to a low-level place and beat up every kobold miner or whatever that comes near you, or you can play a low-level character and mail the linen to the higher-level one. If you do the latter, then the low-level character is transferring a reward to a character that didn't earn it, only it's in the opposite direction to that in which transfers usually take place. Thus, I called it "reverse-twinking". I'm happy to call it just another example of "twinking" if you like. The thing is, this can happen with twinking (low-level and high-level characters can establish a supplier/consumer chain, which can form the basis of an economic system), but where's the equivalent in RMT?
>All RMT is twinking, but not all twinking is RMT.
Not all RMT is twinking. If you buy something with no tangible game effect, eg. armour dye, is that twinking? What if everyone knows that the only way to get armour dye is to buy it from the game developer?
Likewise, the bits of twinking that aren't RMT might be some other subset which is acceptable or even planned-for by the designer. ATITD's marriage system, for example, allows players to become joined at the hip. Two characters effectively become one, as a partnership. Now imagine this translated to WoW: couples would have benefits in terms of being able to twink one another, but they'd "pay" for it with some non-benefits in that they could rip one another off, too. That shield of yours, well, it's mine, too, and I'm using it right now so you can't. See? There are ways to have twinking that aren't morally equivalent to RMT, of which RMT isn't a subset, and which a designer might want to have.
Your argument is that RMT is bad, twinking is RMT writ large, therefore twinking is also bad. This may be true in the majority of cases we have at the moment, but it's not an absolute truth. Sometimes, both RMT and twinking can have modifications to them which would render them acceptable to the designer, if not necessarily someone with hard-line anti-twinking views.
>What was the advantage in MUD1 of using the low-level character for treasure gathering instead of a high-level one?
You didn't get so upset when you were attacked and killed (MUD1 had permanent death).
>Did it have something to do with the Tearoom Warlock phenomenon?
It went beyond that. A Tearoom Warlock (or, more often, Tearoom Warlock) was a player who reached the highest mortal level (ie. next level would make them a wiz - an admin-level character) but who didn't have the skill or confidence or both to go out and get the necessary experience points. If they left the safety of the Elizabethan Tearoom, they would be a target for killers and would either have to flee so often that they fell to the level below or they'd be killed. Thus, they were content to hang around in the Tearoom, revelling in their high-rank status, but only going out into the place where the points were if they thought they could get a few very quickly or if they thought there were no nasty killers around.
This was fine. The next step was banned, which would be where they went on with a sorcerer, say, collected a bunch of treasure, left it somewhere easy to get to, then quit and came in swiftly with their high-level character to collect the stash, score for it, and quit. This is what we called "looby-looing". Doing it would get you fined points; doing it repeatedly would get you fined your character.
>Was there was a threshold which introduced additional danger to a character if crossed...
The higher your level, the more attractive a target you were. There wasn't an exact threshold, but mages pretty well always had (hmm, I should be saying "have", as people do still play this game!) to be on their guard.
>The fundamental problem with this approach, IMO, is that you're creating generally unenforceable rules, and ones that reference player behaviors outside the game.
They're not generally unenforceable. They may be generally unenforced, but they're not generally unenforceable.
Referencing behaviours outside the game is valid. As I keep pointing out, bribery to sports stars to throw matches is regarded by real-life law as being a criminal offence; why should virtual worlds not regard RMT as wrong by the same token?
>This is the analogous landscape to twinkers versus straight-up players. Now let's extend it to twinkers versus RMT.
I disagree. If the "charging" and so on is against the rules of play, the referee should penalise it. If the referee does not penalise it, then the referee is being derelict in their duty. Whether charging should be against the rules is a different matter, of course, but irrelevant as to whether it actually is against the rules or not.
>It was not the offers of scholarships which "ruined the game" in this case... it was the referees allowing players to distort the competitive landscape at will and refusing to enforce penalties equally.
I agree. If the rules aren't enforced, then that's a distortion. The problem, though, is that the rules aren't being enforced, not that the rules are bad rules.
>There may be few (if any) equivalent substitutes, and there may already be substantial time/resource investment into this particular scenario.
So in other words, you looked at the game, saw what went on, decided you liked 99% of it but not that 1% of it, made your investment anyway, and then found that actually that 1% of it impacted on the 99% of it you did like more than you thought it would. Having invested, though, you're reluctant to pull out, so you want everyone else to change instead - even though they all have investments, too, and even though they're happy with 100% of the rules.
>You can walk away and lose both your investment and your opportunities... or you can level the competitive playing field by ignoring the unfair anti-scout rule
And then you find that by ignoring the rule, the product itself isn't what it was. Let's say that some other team's manager regards it as "unfair" that your team has a better coach, so they give their players steroids to improve their performance. Their team does well, they get more money coming in, and your team suffers despite having the better coach. They broke the rules, but hey, from their point of view they feel indignant that the rules were there to start with, they just want a level playing field. Should they be allowed to continue? Should you be allowed to give your players steroids?
The game rules are the playing field. If you don't think it's level, don't play.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 22, 2006 at 06:21
randolfe >'So the only substantive response is "it violates the EULA". Apparently we're not interested in actually determining if the EULA provisions vis-a-vis RMT are legally enforcable, we just think the assertion is sufficient.'
It seems to me that the EULA serves (at least) two purposes. One has to do with legal rights and such, but the other is simply to set out game rules. When we are talking about game rules, the whole notion of legally enforceable seems a bit daft to me.
This is like questioning whether the rules laid out in the booklet that comes with my monopoly game are legally enforceable. Rules define a game. They are a type of social contract agreed upon by those who participate in the game. And from time immemorial, the manner in which games handle the breaking of this social contract is by not allowing violators to continue playing. If it ever becomes illegal to kick cheaters out of games then games will cease to exist. There can be no magic circle where those who own and host the game are not allowed to draw the line that creates it.
So, although the EULA's validity can be challenged as a legal document, as a rules book, I don't see how it can be questioned. Those who break it are cheating. They are violating the social contract that all game participants are required to maintain, and that they have personally agreed to maintain. For me, trying to rationalize game-rule-breaking behavior by questioning the legality of the EULA is a red herring.
--Phin
Posted by: Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz | Jan 24, 2006 at 11:54
Richard Bartle wrote:
Errr... no. You got that almost (but not quite) totally wrong as a statement of my position. You're putting the cart before the horse.
My position is that (abusive levels of) twinking is bad, abusive levels of RMT first require the ability to abusively twink (typically without being penalized), and therefore that abusive levels of RMT arise only because there is the unrestrained and unpunished ability to abusively twink... and therefore that attacking only the RMT without addressing the real underlying problem is a bad "solution".
It's not really a solution IMO, because the game will still be thoroughly wrecked (in any major implementation) even if you had 100% perfect enforcement against everyone who ever used RMT. The hardcore twinkers would ensure that the game was still wrecked, because you did nothing to treat the real problem.
That makes the motivations for that behavior much clearer.
I wrote: "The fundamental problem with this approach, IMO, is that you're creating generally unenforceable rules, and ones that reference player behaviors outside the game." and Richard replied:
Of course they are! In the vast majority of cases, you will never have a mechanism for accurately determining whether or not the two parties exchanged real-life money outside the game.
That means that you can't enforce the rule against those using RMT unless you're willing to throw the baby out with the bath water (ban everyone who twinks at abusive levels for non-RMT reasons to get at the RMT folks). If you do so, your players will correctly identify that you're not adhering to the criteria of the rule as the reason for the bans. You'll have more than enough false positives to bring CS to overload levels.
(I'm not talking about niche games here, I'm talking about the major MMO implementations... 10,000 plus players)
If you're going to do that, you may as well make it a rule that accurately reflects the true decision-making criteria: that someone transferred an unbalancing amount of in-game wealth to someone else... which is what I've been talking about all along.
I call it a generally unenforceable rule because you lack the data in most cases to determine whether there actually was a violation or not. If it makes it clearer for you, treat it as if I had said "It's generally unenforceable with any reasonably high degree of accuracy (low false positives and low false negatives)."
That's why I treat it as similar to a thoughtcrime... it's massively difficult to prove with any reasonable degree of accuracy if the target is reasonably intelligent, and generally doesn't affect the rest of the outside world.
I believe the law (at least in the US) would also regard it as a criminal offense to deliberately throw a high-profile match for romantic reasons, or to fulfill some other obligation. Cash doesn't have to change hands.
It can still be "bribery" even if the consideration for taking the action isn't cash.
So the law is regarding the out-of-character action of deliberately losing as the real crime... not the exchange of cash per se.
Again, to have your analogy hold in comparison to today's MMOs, you'd have to say that it's perfectly fine to throw 100% of the matches because your girlfriend asks you to (or as a means of thanking a former mentor who hates that team), but criminal to ever do so if there's cash involved.
It's still bribery in all three cases... one is bribery with sex, one is bribery with personal charisma, and the third is bribery with cash.
I don't think the analogy holds for that reason.
There are explicit landscape-defining rules in games... in things like Monopoly, they define the mechanics of the game. These are analogous to the game physics implemented in MMOs.
There are also the general rules of game-play... the social contract. People are expected to play fairly. If they don't, people rightfully consider that the game has been ruined. In MMOs, this is generally articulated through the EULA.
There are ways to grossly evade the spirit of the rules of Monopoly while sticking to the letter. If I've set up a gauntlet of hotels designed to bankrupt you, you can avoid transferring that power to me if you land on my properties, even though by game rule it's supposed to be mine.
You could, for instance, exploit the rent-collecting rules and the property sales rules to give means to evade the rule against borrowing or lending money to other players.
If you're about to go bankrupt, you could deliberately buy a property from someone for all of your cash, and then sell it (and all the rest of your property) back to them for $1.
Heck, since there's no explicit rule against gifts (only loans), you could technically say you're following the rules if you gift your property and cash away to evade enriching the player who's winning.
But doing so is wrong, because it wrecks the game, by ruining the social contract. Even if there is no explicit rule, it's still wrong.
If it gets to the point where "allowed" things like this wreck the competitive nature of the game, then as far as I'm concerned, it's stopped being a game. It's a social power struggle instead.
If a game I'm playing has been wrecked like this, I'll try to point it out and ask for a restoration of the game to "civilized" game-playing standards. If there's no willingness on the part of the designated rule-enforcer, then I cease treating it like a game... because the other participants have, too.
At that point, I might illustrate the point by engaging in a different behavior that might not be technically against the written rules (i.e. the game's physics), but that violates the spirit... especially if by doing so, I can restore the some of the winning edge that was wrongfully taken from me.
How would I respond to someone who complained that I was the one ruining the game? I'd point out that it stopped being a game when others were given permission to violate the social contract to my detriment, and my legitimate requests for redress were ignored... so there's no "game" to ruin anymore. There's only social posturing. The others who played unfairly and were given the blessings of the rule enforcer turned it into a meta-game, so I'll play a meta-game too.
I vastly prefer fair games, and play them often. It's a pity that most of today's MMOs permit large-scale grotesque violations of the social covenant (by failing to punish outrageous and disruptive levels of social twinking). They'd be a lot closer to fairly-competitive if they eliminated that, instead of targeting only those who violate that covenant for particular reasons, like cash. In the interim, they are a lot less like games. They are more like social pastimes / gathering places with some game-like features.
In the absence of reasonably fair MMO games that are still interesting (to me) and large, I'll play using what's available. If I can't have a reasonably fair game on that distorted landscape, I can at least get something game-like out of it. It's a meta-game of sorts using the environment of the alleged original "game".
If Joe Teenager gets to receive 10,000 gold pieces as a level 1 gift from a schoolmate without punishment, then I'll see nothing wrong in getting a 10,000 gold gift given to me for other considerations... and it's generally no one's business but mine what those considerations are. Likewise, if someone else wants to restore the balance for their character, I might be the one giving them the gift... for the right consideration.
None of the behaviors that I engage in are any more disruptive to the actual game landscape than those of the heavy social twinkers (who receive no penalties), and most are vastly less disruptive. Since I'm doing nothing in-game that isn't allowed to others in-game for other reasons, I have no problem with ignoring the purely out-of-game nature of an anti-RMT rule.
I contend that there is a definite market out there for very large MMO-style games which actually attempt to keep the competitive landscape fair (on at least some servers). That's why I'm designing rulesets in one of my projects to explicitly resist attempts to twink to abusive levels... and to preserve achievement and the associated tokens as meaningful, rather than fake.
The players who want to compete fairly will be able to do so without twinking wrecking things... and by doing so, the game economy will naturally resist RMT.
There will be other servers with relaxed rules for folks who want to be able to twink heavily... and I'll expect that RMT will arise on those servers, too. It would be foolish of me to try to forbid it via EULA, since that ruleset is designed as more of a game-like social playground rather than a strict game with social elements.
If harmful levels of RMT ever arises on the achievement-preserving servers, then I have a design failure that needs fixing.
Posted by: Barry Kearns | Jan 26, 2006 at 21:04
Here's an update for those still interested in this topic.
My March 2006 issue of PC Gamer has a two page ad from Mythic entertainment with the following text:
Begin ad text>>
DON'T BUY FROM FARMERS!*
Mythic Entertainment, a longstanding and outspoken critic of practices such as "gold farming" and secondary market sales of virtual assets, proudly joins PC Gamer in their stance* against companies who look upon MMOs as the "virtual gold rush" of our era.
In the interset of our players, we will refuse to advertise in any magazine that features ads from such companies. We call upon other MMO publishers to join us in this poloicy. We will also continue to design game systems to thwart these organizations and their unwelcome activities in our MMOs.
Show your support and don't buy from farmers!
*See the Letter From the Editor in the February 2006 issue - "PC Gamer no longer accepts ads or ad dollars from Gold Farmers. Screw them."
>>end ad text
--Phin
Posted by: Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz | Jan 30, 2006 at 22:23
Barry> "I vastly prefer fair games, and play them often. It's a pity that most of today's MMOs permit large-scale grotesque violations of the social covenant (by failing to punish outrageous and disruptive levels of social twinking)."
It's funny, but I don't think of twinking as either disruptive or unfair. I certainly don't consider myself beholden to a social covenant to not engage in twinking (although I can't say that I've ever been outrageously twinked). I can see that you think non-twinking is clearly the spirit if not the letter of the law set out by the EULA, but I just don't see it.
I think maybe the disconnect is that I don't personally see the main point of MMORPGs as a competition to aquire more levels or better loot for bragging rights. That isn't to say that MMORPGs don't devolve into this sort of thing, only that I don't think it is a given that this is entirely what they are about, what they are intended to be about, or what they should be about. Certainly there isn't anything in the EULAs that I've read to suggest that collecting some sort of bragging rights is The Intended Focus.
On the contrary, most MMORPGs seem to want to support more diverse playstyles; role playing, for instance (imagine that). Now, to me, it might make sense for such a game to allow twinking in order for new players to join in with their friends in role playing and adventuring together. (After all, it isn't at all unusual for new players joining a PnP game to roll a character that is comparable to the rest of the party, or to be given gear to help them stay alive and keep. Is this cheating?) If it is possible that MMORPGs have been designed with a broader focus for gameplay, should twinking really be curtailed simply because some players are *meta-gaming* a very achievement-oriented approach to them?
--Phin
Posted by: Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz | Jan 30, 2006 at 22:57
Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz wrote:
Keep in mind, I'm only talking about abusive levels of twinking, where the competitive landscape between twinkers and non-twinkers is severely distorted. I've never had a problem with small amounts of non-disruptive twinking happening at the margins... such twinking doesn't "wreck the game". That's why I've explicitly implemented gifting into the achievement-preserving server ruleset for my offering. However, my implementation allows a casual observer to tell whether someone has received something as a gift, or whether they earned it themselves. Twinkers don't get to use the gift as a way to represent a fake achievement, nor do they get an unlimited ability to receive power-transferring gifts.
Keep in mind, much of the hue and cry that arises when RMT shows up is that "the game is being ruined" because someone with a credit card gets to fake achievement when others have earned it... and this sometimes devalues the achievement in the eyes of those who earned it "the hard way".
Faking an achievement via social twinking is equally corrosive to in-game achievement in this circumstance as RMT is... because precisely the same thing is happening in-game. Someone who didn't earn some large amount of power is having it just given to them, and they often use that to fake achievement. It doesn't matter whether cash also changed hands outside the game... the interior landscape is wrecked in the same manner.
My point is that the "bragging rights" aspect of preserving achievement is (at least in my experience) the primary argument used by those in-game who universally oppose RMT. They say it cheapens their own achievements when someone can just buy the same achievement tokens (trophies) by slapping down a credit card.
What they often seem to fail to recognize is that someone faking the achievement because they got a buddy to gift them 10,000 gold is eroding the achievement landscape in the same way as someone who bought the 10,000 gold from another player.
I don't see anything wrong with role playing, or with rolling up a higher-level (unearned) character for peer-level play... because everyone in the game knows that the character was rolled up as a high-level, rather than played through "the hard way".
I think the "sidekick" system in CoH/CoV is also neat, for precisely that reason. It's nice to be able to play meaningfully with friends even though you're of a substantially lower level. That's awesome.
But a sidekick doesn't get to transform the powered-up state into a permanent unearned level increase, where no one can tell whether they earned it or not.
The biggest problem seems to arise with players that are able to counterfeit achievement in ways that can't be easily distinguished from true achievement... the "forgery" is too good, in a way.
Keep in mind, I'm speaking to a particularly narrow aspect of the anti-RMT debate... specifically, the one that would ban players (who were lifelong friends in real life) for one giving the other $20 when gifting 10,000 gold, but do nothing at all if they gifted 10,000 gold without also exchanging $20.
This is a separate issue from farming, from exploiting, from spawn camping, from aggressively and disruptively trying to "own" a farming spot, from in-game advertising, from game email spam... all of those are separate in-game aspects that I think should be dealt with aggressively when they disrupt the play experience for the rest of the server... but all of those things can, do, and have happened in the absence of RMT. Punishing RMT doesn't treat those problems... it instead attacks only a subset of the problem-causing population, and wrongfully punishes many who were never disruptive.
Consider the following circumstance: If I conduct myself with the utmost decorum in the game, if I share spawn points well, if I am universally courteous and respectful in chat and email, and if I generally conduct myself in a non-disruptive manner, help answer the questions of newbies, participate in the community... in-game behavior where the other game players would consider me a "model citizen", what should happen if I gift 10,000 gold to another character?
If the gift is not disruptive to the balance of the game if I do this out of friendship, then I contend that whether or not the other player and I also exchanged some out-of-game cash should not play into the decision as to whether I should be banned.
I'm against over-the-top farming... but I'm against it whether it's a social guild doing it or someone doing it knowing they are going to sell the gold rather than gift it to a guildmate.
I'm against exploiting and duping... and it doesn't matter whether it's to be sold or to "corner the market" for your in-game social guild.
I'm against disruptive in-game chat and unsolicited game emails for out-of-game reasons... but I believe this regardless of whether there's also a profit motive for the behavior.
I'm against the excessive cheapening of in-game achievements via over-the-top transfers of unearned power... but if you're going to say it's OK to grossly fake achievement for social reasons, then I think it only makes sense that it also be OK to do so with cash. I'd rather that neither occur, but if you're intent on banning one, you should ban the other, too.
Combatting the in-game disruptive behavior of players is something I'm generally in favor of... it's when game administrators want to take behavior that is not in-game disruptive (if done for "social reasons") and impose virtual death-sentences (permabans) on players who also receive some financial compensation at the same time that I object to. To me, that's punishment for a thoughtcrime.
I think that in the rush to combat the excessively disruptive elements that can (and often do) manifest when large-scale RMT is present in a game lead to a "throw the baby out with the bathwater" reaction, where non-disruptive players (who are often merely trying to balance the scales with the social twinkers) get thrown out with the disruptive ones... and it's a shame IMO, because the same goal of non-disruption can be achieved without having to even guess as to whether there's any cash changing hands: you simply punish the in-game behaviors of disruptive power transfers and disruptive gameplay (or better yet, fix the game mechanics to make the behavior less appealing to begin with).
Earth and Beyond was wrecked IMO to a large extent because of large-scale disruptive behaviors of a social guild, without regard to RMT at all. They were doing it because they could, and the game mechanics rewarded them for engaging in ridiculously disruptive levels of twinking. No RMT rule in the world would have stopped that... but appropriate enforced anti-twinking and anti-disruptive- play rules would have, and would have also appropriately punished anyone whose RMT activities disrupted the game, too.
Posted by: Barry Kearns | Jan 31, 2006 at 13:54
Barry> "My point is that the "bragging rights" aspect of preserving achievement is (at least in my experience) the primary argument used by those in-game who universally oppose RMT. They say it cheapens their own achievements when someone can just buy the same achievement tokens (trophies) by slapping down a credit card."
Again, this helps me see the disconnect. Since I'm not very much interested in the bragging rights side of things, I have very little sympathy for that argument against RMT. (I'm more likely to be sympathetic for the casual gamer who doesn't have 40-hours-per-week to invest in order to keep up with friends.) So, I guess it makes sense that your argument against a position I don't personally hold isn't really getting much traction from my perspective. ;)
I feel there are much better arguments against RMT based simply on the violation of the magic circle of the game. Whether someone "buys" achievement tokens out of their abundance of time or their abundance of money makes little difference to me (I don't think either are particularly "fair"), except that the first happens within the magic circle and the second happens outside of it. From this perspective, I don't think of twinking as any more or less "fair" than expending ridiculous (dare I say disruptive? Think of how much easier to balance, fair, etc. MMORPGs would be if everyone played the same amount of time per week) amounts of free time "earning" achievment tokens, since both happen within the magic circle. Since RMT steps outside of that circle, however, I think it is a problem.
Barry> "If the gift is not disruptive to the balance of the game if I do this out of friendship, then I contend that whether or not the other player and I also exchanged some out-of-game cash should not play into the decision as to whether I should be banned."
I just don't see how this follows, unless you are just saying that you don't particularly like the rules as they are. But to me, that is totally different than saying that someone shouldn't be banned for breaking the rules. I mean, if we sit down to play a game of Monopoly, you may think that getting cash for landing on "just parking" makes the game more interesting, while I may insist on sticking to the "official" rules. Hopefully, with a small number of players, we'll be able to agree on something, but maybe not. (Obviously, this sort of negotiation over rules becomes much more problematic when we are talking about thousands of players.) If it is my game, I get to make the final decision on what rules we'll use. Of course, you still have the right to either play the game by the rules or not play the game. If you *agree* to the rules, then a social contract is in place. After that point in time, if you try to slip $500 from the bank when I'm not looking because you landed on "just parking" and that's the way you think Monopoly should be played, you are cheating. Rationalization may tend to bring up what the rules should be, but cheating is only concerned with what the rules are. In a similar fashion, bannings are (must be) based solely on the rules that exist and the social contract that has been established. If you are caught taking that $500 from the bank, then both the owner of the game and all those players who are playing within the rules have every right to label you a cheater and to ask you to leave. That's how multi-player games work.
In an MMORPG, the game rules are established in the EULA and exist in full force as game rules/social contract without regard to the EULA's validity as a legal document.
Barry> "I'm against the excessive cheapening of in-game achievements via over-the-top transfers of unearned power... but if you're going to say it's OK to grossly fake achievement for social reasons, then I think it only makes sense that it also be OK to do so with cash. I'd rather that neither occur, but if you're intent on banning one, you should ban the other, too."
I'm not sure what the "grossly fake achievement for social reasons" is speaking to, but I don't see how it gets much traction against the PnP scenario I mentioned earlier. Surely where the point is to role play with friends, the very notion of grossly faking achievement for social reasons seems a bit nonsensical. This kind of language only makes sense if you assume a priori that the point of the game is achievement. I don't think that this is actually the point of MMORPGs, but I do recognize it as a way in which they are meta-gamed. Should we really complain, however, about someone "cheapening" a meta-game experience? There are an infinite number of ways to meta-game, so how do we figure out which ones others are allowed to "cheapen" and which ones they are not?
--Phin
Posted by: Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz | Feb 01, 2006 at 18:09
Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz wrote:
I still get the feeling that you're not grokking the distinction I'm trying to make... I'm not talking about someone having excessive free time having an unfair advantage (catassery).
The distinction I'm trying to draw is not "lots of time versus lots of money"... it's a case (for me) of characters in the game receiving excessive advantages for no good in-game reason.
It's about unearned power at a level that grossly distorts the competitive landscape. If they get that as a gift for out-of-game reasons, they've probably wrecked the magic circle... no matter if it was a schoolmate who gifted it or a stranger who did so for $50.
I'm talking about achievement tokens being alienable... when that happens, it sets the stage for miscreants to represent their fake achievements as if they were real achievements, and thereby cheapen the "extraordinary" nature of difficult in-game achievements.
If it takes three months' worth of difficult, hard-fought battling against difficult odds in order to slay the Titanium Dragon, and thereby earn the ultra-rare and powerful Amulet of the Dragon, it's going to be more than a little annoying if five hundred perfect copies of the Amulet start showing up around the necks of losers who don't even know where the dragon *is*.
The achievement (and the associated trophy which serves as validation of that accomplishment) is thereby thoroughly cheapened in the eyes of many.
If the third guy to ever defeat the dragon comes up with a way of duping the Amulet, or repeatedly running the instance via some exploit, or taking advantage of some way to give Amulets to those who never earned them... it doesn't really matter whether he's giving them away to buddies or selling them on eBay. He's wrecking the status of the trophy for out-of-game reasons... with either motivation, he's grossly breaking the magic circle.
If someone is a catass, at least *they* are the ones who expended the time to achieve the goal. Uber-twinkers don't even do that... they get the tokens of glory without ever having to work for them.
If someone has all of the fruits of a long and arduous journey without ever having to actually do anything other than hit the "Accept" button in the trade window, then there's no real way to distinguish a true accomplishment from a fake one in that context, and it doesn't really matter if it's a twink-gift or an RMT transaction. The magic circle is ruined.
This makes me question whether you actually play many of the major mainstream MMOs... can you honestly use a phrase like "only makes sense if you assume a priori that the point of the game is achievement" with a straight face in that context?
People have been pointing out for a LONG time now that most major MMOs do almost nothing but pander to the Achiever Bartle-type.
Of course I assume that the "point" of the game is achievement... it's a competitive and vastly multi-player game, where acquisition tends to grant competitive advantages. There are a handful of exceptions, but almost every major MMO I can think of is focused almost entirely on achievement, and the flamewars about "balance" between classes are a prime example of the prevailing mindset. Do you contend that everyone who is upset about cross-class balance is only meta-gaming, and somehow "missing the point" of the game?
Can you tell me the name of a single major MMO that is successful, incorporates PvP, and isn't focused around achievement?
There are cooperative games like ATITD, and social VW / sandboxes like Second Life... but that's not the heart of the industry.
Achievement is the big boss-dog. You might not want the "point" of most of today's MMOs to be about achievement, but I would contend that you're being naive if you think they aren't.
To understand the "grossly fake achievement for social reasons" please review my comment on the adjacent thread regarding the train-wreck of abusive levels of twinking in Earth and Beyond.
Perhaps you need to have had your favorite game thoroughly ruined by abusive social twinkers to understand just how disruptive it can be.
This doesn't compare to the PnP examples that you cited, precisely because these MMO games are so large that in almost every case, the vast majority of the people you interact with (and compete against) are not known friends... they are most-often complete strangers. That's why I pointed out that it needed to be an environment large enough to where you're competing against strangers.
In a massively multi-player achievement-oriented game, it's common to distinguish yourself to strangers by way of achievement... you out-compete them. It's not really fair cricket if one of the strangers gets a buddy to gift him huge competitive advantages over you, now, is it?
If it's unbalancing for someone to buy a competitive advantage for $50, it's also unbalancing for someone else to receive that same unearned competitive advantage as a gift from a classmate.
To make your analogy of Monopoly play align with the environment of today's MMOs and typical anti-RMT rules, you'd need to posit playing Monopoly against (most often) complete strangers, and then having someone implement a "rule" which said that it's fine for people to gift unlimited amounts of property and cash to each other during the game if friendship is the motivator, but against the rules if there's any cash involved.
Such a game ruleset will not be able to maintain a truly competitive game atmosphere, because people will wreck the game based on gifts for social reasons, even if you stop every cash transaction that ever happened. Once the game is large enough for in-game anonymity, the worst aspects of human nature will arise with increasing frequency, and that frequency will rise as the population rises... if only because there will be more people at the most egregious end of the bell curve.
Posted by: Barry Kearns | Feb 01, 2006 at 20:24
For me, trying to rationalize game-rule-breaking behavior by questioning the legality of the EULA is a red herring.
Show me any EULA which defines the "game rules" beyond broad statements meant to protect the publisher's consideration and interests, please. EULAs are intensely legal beasts, not rule books by any measure. Unless you mean to say that a rule book is "we reserve the rights to set any rules we wish, ammended at any time, applied in any manner of our choosing".
I wouldn't play Monopoly with that rulebook, would you? The analogy is void anyhow, because Monopoly does not come anywhere near the threshold of a dynamic socioeconomic system. A MMO with 4 players would be a vastly different beast than one with 1.5M players.
Just because something is "a game" doesn't mean it escapes the overarching rules, laws, norms, mores, and behavioral truisms. This will become abruptly apparent to Linden Labs, for example, whenever an enforcement agency decides to execute existing gambling laws against them and their players. The fact their EULA asserts that L$ have no value won't matter under examination of the pragmatic reality that L$ do have value.
It is useful to look at VWs from the outside from time-to-time. People clearly are gaining economic utility from engaging in RMT, or there wouldn't be the demand. Game publishers are free, in my opinion, to design games that minimize the impacts of RMT (by establishing better, functional economic systems that actually work). If they did this, then establishing anti-RMT rules would have forceable credibility. This is not the case today. What we have today is essentialy a decriminalization regime, where publishers can claim they're against RMT, but they conveniently neither invest the capital to deactivate the problem nor do they eschew the revenues they directly earn from the activity it generates.
Posted by: randolfe_ | Feb 01, 2006 at 22:49
Barry> "The distinction I'm trying to draw is not "lots of time versus lots of money"... it's a case (for me) of characters in the game receiving excessive advantages for no good in-game reason."
Right. I'm happy to claim the time vs. money distinction as entirely my own. :) This is a really good argument, and I am sympathetic to your "no good in-game reason" point. But I still think there may be a small crack in the logical armor in that "excessive advantages" still assumes a very achievement-oriented approach.
Barry> "People have been pointing out for a LONG time now that most major MMOs do almost nothing but pander to the Achiever Bartle-type."
While I think that "pander" holds a little too much intent, I mostly agree with what you are saying here. And to answer your prior question, I actually don't play most of the mainstream MMOs for this reason and others. I personally prefer worldish MMOs over gamey ones. On the other hand, I think that some developers still have a goal of serving more than just one of the Bartle types. We can certainly discuss to some length how well they are doing this, but I'm only trying to point out that I think they have the right to try to balance game vs. world as they see fit. The rules on twinking vs. RMT may well be an attempt to do just that.
Some developers have openly mused (I want to say it was Raph, but I can't seem to find the post/article at the moment) about how institutionalized twinking could be a benefit to the social aspect of MMOs. It has long been held that players who have friends in-game are much more likely to keep paying their monthly dues. With this in mind, it seems to me that making a distinction between twinking and RMT based solely on the social aspect is a valid (without regard to whether a particular gamer likes it or not) design choice. Maybe a designer said to himself, "You know what, we *do* pander too much to achievers. Let's do something that panders a bit to socializers for a change." Are the achievers going to like it? Probably not. But then it can hardly be said that the developers are pandering solely to achievers, can it?
Barry> "To make your analogy of Monopoly play align with the environment of today's MMOs and typical anti-RMT rules, you'd need to posit playing Monopoly against (most often) complete strangers, and then having someone implement a "rule" which said that it's fine for people to gift unlimited amounts of property and cash to each other during the game if friendship is the motivator, but against the rules if there's any cash involved."
OK, let's go with those rules then. My points still hold that the game owner has the final say on rules, that the players have a right to play or not by those rules, and that those who agree to play and then break the rules are cheating and ought to be banned. Can we agree on this even if neither one of us particularly likes playing Monopoly by those rules?
This gets to my main point: I think that developers have the right to make any sort of distinction they want in the EULA-as-game-rules-not-legal-document. If they think the distinction will take the game in the direction they want to take it (not necessarily the direction I think it should go) and if they think it is a good idea (even though I may think it is a boneheaded one), then it is a valid design decision and one by which all players, by social contract, should abide. Those who do not are cheaters and should be banned. Period.
So, to strive for that last bit of clarity, I see two propositions here.
1) Developers have the right (in-social-contract-not-legal-terms) to ban players who do not abide by the EULA (as-game-rules-and-not-legal-document), and indeed it is their responsibility to do so for the sake of other players who are playing by the rules. Players do not have the right (in-social-contract-terms) to ignore game rules simply because they don't agree with them. They only have the right not to play.
2) Twinking is just as harmful to an MMO as RMT, even allowing for any sort of social benefit that may be gained. Since most of the mainstream MMOs appear to have a strong focus on achievement, designers should not make any decisions that may undermine this focus in favor of another. If a design decision does undermine the achievement aspect of the game, then it must be said that the *entire game* has been cheapened/ruined/etc., not merely that the *achievement aspect of the game* has been undermined, even though some other aspect of the game may have been strengthened.
I am arguing most vociferously in favor of proposition (1), and only against proposition (2) to the extent that I believe there may be valid reasons why a developer may make a twinking/RMT distinction and that this further supports my stance on proposition (1) even though proposition (1) still stands without any such support.
I know that you are arguing in favor of proposition (2) (or some less-strawman-like version of it :) ), but I'm curious to know where you stand on proposition (1), since that's the real heart of what I'm saying.
--Phin
Posted by: Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz | Feb 01, 2006 at 22:52
randolfe> "Show me any EULA which defines the "game rules" beyond broad statements meant to protect the publisher's consideration and interests, please. EULAs are intensely legal beasts, not rule books by any measure."
Seriously? Are you trying to say that there is some question as to whether RMT is against the stated game rules? Step away from the rationalization for a moment and take a look at the facts. No one is unclear about the rules regarding RMT. They only bring EULA legal questions into the discussion because they *want* the rules to be unclear, but in reality, everyone knows there is a rule against RMT. I don't think too many people are sending Blizzard emails asking whether or not players can engage in RMT. Have you sent such an email? If so, I'm pretty sure you will get a response that RMT is against WoW's rules. If you are aware of the rules (and we all are) and you break them, then you are cheating. Cheaters can and should be banned. Claiming that EULAs are intensely legal beasts is simply another attempt to side step the issue and rationalize actions that break the social contract between players. I don't care if their EULA is written in legalese or whether it spells things out in game terms or not, if you don't know Blizzard's stance on RMT, then you don't *want* to know it, and any claim that your are not violating the social contract inherent in the game's rules is ridiculous no matter how many red herrings you throw out.
randolfe> "Unless you mean to say that a rule book is 'we reserve the rights to set any rules we wish, ammended at any time, applied in any manner of our choosing'.
I wouldn't play Monopoly with that rulebook, would you?"
Nope. I sure wouldn't. But if for some strange reason (oh, let's say profit motive) I did decide to play Monopoly with that rulebook, not abiding by the rules, though they be ammended and applied in randomly haphazard fashion, would make me a cheater and should get me banned.
randolfe> "The analogy is void anyhow, because Monopoly does not come anywhere near the threshold of a dynamic socioeconomic system. A MMO with 4 players would be a vastly different beast than one with 1.5M players."
Not as far as game rules, social contracts, cheating, and banning go.
randolfe> "Just because something is "a game" doesn't mean it escapes the overarching rules, laws, norms, mores, and behavioral truisms."
Agreed. It only means that those who violate the game's rules are cheaters who should be banned.
randolfe> "This will become abruptly apparent to Linden Labs, for example, whenever an enforcement agency decides to execute existing gambling laws against them and their players. The fact their EULA asserts that L$ have no value won't matter under examination of the pragmatic reality that L$ do have value."
That's sounds like a good argument against RMT to me, but I'll agree that Linden may be a special case because of their two-mindedness about whether they are a game or a nation. But we seem to be straying once again toward examining the legal issues of EULAs, which again nicely side steps the fact that breaking a game's rules is cheating and that cheaters should be banned. The veracity of this statement is not at all affected by whether or not SL violates gambling laws or whether or not the $L has real world value. In other words, this is a red herring.
randolfe> "It is useful to look at VWs from the outside from time-to-time. People clearly are gaining economic utility from engaging in RMT, or there wouldn't be the demand. Game publishers are free, in my opinion, to design games that minimize the impacts of RMT (by establishing better, functional economic systems that actually work)."
Sure they are. They are also free (as is every person hosting games that involve multiple players) to make game rules about RMT or any other thing they want. Those who play are agreeing to a game rules social contract and if they subsequently break these rules then they are cheating and should be banned. Those who play and break the rules but then bring up legal issues or talk about how the game should be designed differently are, once again, throwing out red herrings.
randolfe> "If they did this, then establishing anti-RMT rules would have forceable credibility. This is not the case today. What we have today is essentialy a decriminalization regime, where publishers can claim they're against RMT, but they conveniently neither invest the capital to deactivate the problem nor do they eschew the revenues they directly earn from the activity it generates."
The next time you get a speeding ticket, why don't you try that one out with the judge. Point out that so many other drivers seem to be able to get away with driving 5 - 10 mph over the limit, but don't get pulled over. Talk about how this essentially creates a decriminalization regime and how the county is obviously not investing the capital to hire enough police officers to deactivate the problem. Put forward a theory about how the county actually wants you to speed so that they can add your fine to their coffers. Point out how they obviously don't eschew the revenues they directly earn when people engage in speeding. See how far that gets you. The fact of the matter is that any judge worth her salt will throw that out for the flowery bit of rationalization that it is.
Game rules are all the forceable credibility that a game needs in order to determine who is cheating and who should be banned.
--Phin
Posted by: Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz | Feb 01, 2006 at 23:58
The problem I see here is that some people view game worlds as being a competition and others just view it as a virtual sandbox. It's like going to the beach and watching a kid spend hours building a great sandcastle. While he is finishing up, another kid is just arriving with the superduper sandcastle form builder, and proceeds to build an equal castle in 15 minutes. The first kid looks over and says, "he cheated." The second kid says, "cheated at what? This wasn't a competition." So the first kid feels bad because his effort is now diminished in the public eye because someone else has done the same thing. The second kid could care less, he just wanted to build a kick-ass sandcastle without spending the whole day doing it.
Posted by: alan | Feb 02, 2006 at 08:40
Phin
The next time you get a speeding ticket, why don't you try that one out with the judge. Point out that so many other drivers seem to be able to get away with driving 5 - 10 mph over the limit, but don't get pulled over. Talk about how this essentially creates a decriminalization regime and how the county is obviously not investing the capital to hire enough police officers to deactivate the problem. Put forward a theory about how the county actually wants you to speed so that they can add your fine to their coffers. Point out how they obviously don't eschew the revenues they directly earn when people engage in speeding. See how far that gets you. The fact of the matter is that any judge worth her salt will throw that out for the flowery bit of rationalization that it is.
Who is rationalizing here? Last I checked the speeding ticket analogy is an example which quite effectively proves my point. I never asserted that game publishers don't have the *right* nor the *power* to ban rules violators anymore than do judges not have the rights or power to enforce speeding laws. But the value of speeding laws are without *absolute credibility* in every area I'm aware of. Please point out some "zero-tolerance" example. Speeding laws instead slide down a slippery slope of credibility of intention. Of course no one wants to see people zipping through school zones at 80mph, but almost everyone adds an extra few mph to the top end on the freeway. And (here is the important part), this is tolerated by the system. There is little social stigma against speeders, and attempts to enforce truly effective, credibly forceable speeding laws (like automatic ticketing) have been met with overwhelming resistance.
I suggest you ask yourself why this might be? Perhaps people just don't think speeding requires such an investment of capital and labor to create a credibly forceable speeding regime. Perhaps too many people just like to speed from time-to-time and they like to get away with it. If you're a game publisher, shifting back to the argument, you surely can build that superhighway on which very few will want to drive. This is why we have "decriminalization" regimes. It lets the governing body have its cake and eat it too.
Posted by: randolfe_ | Feb 02, 2006 at 13:33
Just for clarification on EULAs vis-a-vis RMT prohibitions. The primary motivation in having such is so the publisher retains comprehensive, exclusive ownership of IP interest and avoids a quite messy situation of having to operate a platform on which their customers have property interest for which the platform provider is (partially or wholly) liable. The more nobel arguments regarding gameplay and fairness are tertiary, at best (assuming they are engaging in a profit motivated endeavor). Referring back to SecondLife, watch the lawsuits fly when they are eventually forced to shut down for this or that reason. A shopping center landlord can force a tenant to sign a lease in which the tenant agrees they can "be removed for any reason, at the lessor's discretion". This doesn't prevent remedy being awarded by courts in many circumstances, largely dependent upon the tenant's interests versus the lessor's implied and direct liability.
Posted by: randolfe_ | Feb 02, 2006 at 13:58
randolfe> "Who is rationalizing here? Last I checked the speeding ticket analogy is an example which quite effectively proves my point. I never asserted that game publishers don't have the *right* nor the *power* to ban rules violators anymore than do judges not have the rights or power to enforce speeding laws."
As I see it, the question at large has more to do with whether or not the players have the *right* to ignore game rules or whether drivers have the *right* to ignore posted speeding limits. I contend that in both cases such a *right* is not present.
--Phin
Posted by: Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz | Feb 08, 2006 at 23:04
Gold Farmers 4-ever!!! We're just trying to make money, cmon guys!
Posted by: VoiceofReason | May 11, 2006 at 10:01
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Posted by: | Dec 08, 2006 at 13:20