RF Online, an MMO which combines hack-and-slash Tolkienesque fantasy elements with the BFG-goodness of Mechwarrior (Q: What's not to like? A: Well nothing, as long as you're cool with the fact that the servers are called "Earth", "Wind", and "Fire") recently banned around 150 accounts of those accused of gold farming/duping/botting/notsurewhatexactlytheyweredoing, and now are threatening all those who traded with them.
"In the next few days, following the 150 RMT accounts, we will be visiting YOU, at least if You bought things from RMT traders. If You had to re-read the last sentence twice you might want to contact us via PM before we reach you. If you reveal the delivery guy, the price you paid including the RMT site and the date you recieved the money we can most likely work something out."
The Second Life Herald who alerted us, also notes that:
"...a couple of game-masters also treated the transgressors to some in-game punishment, climbing into some pimped-out mechsuits to deliver swift one-shots to the criminal characters. Not only that, but they got it all down on video, which you can watch via a link at this MMORPG.com post.
Random observations:
1. It's always difficult to tell exactly what gets you banned in these cases, so I don't want to speculate. But it's a little weird that Codemasters are not restricting themselves to the dupers/botters/evildoersofvariousdescriptions, and are also going after those who simply purchased gold. Unless they can demonstrate that the purchasers knew or were implicated in the impropriety of the banned accounts, it seems to me to be hard to sustain the argument that they should be punished as well. (Yes, yes, I know, it's not permitted under the EULA, but then neither is breathing and we know that people are breathing all the time).
2. Score 2 for ritualized punishment in recent virtual worlds.
3. Game devs hate being likened to governments. Which is weird when they act so much like law enforcement, and adopt the same conventions of oversight, punishment, control, bigger-weapons-than-the-criminals-they-kill, et cetera et cetera.
Sounds like RF is doing what all games should do, cutting this off quick and going after the consumers. They know it's against the rules. Everyone does.
Maybe a GM event where a monster kills them and cleans out their bank account!
Posted by: Kathygnome | Apr 18, 2006 at 11:05
Would it be less offensive to players to set up a no-questions asked system that flatly deleted any duped/farmed plat from the servers, no matter whose hands it had made its way into? That would, in theory, put players on guard and get them asking about where the wealth of their trading partners is coming from.
One way of analyzing what RF is doing is that they're willing to give a break to holders in due course without actual knowledge of the fraud. Those GMs are asking purchasers to name names, sure, but you might also say that people who've done nothing wrong have nothing to fear. As systems for removing duped plat from the world go, RF's at least gives downstream players the opportunity to be heard.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann | Apr 18, 2006 at 11:37
I don't think players find punishment for breaking the rules objectionable in the least. If anything, I would say that most players are clamoring for MORE enforcement of the rules, not less. Follow the forums for DAOC (radar bans) and WoW (gold farmers who use teleport hacks in Dire Maul) for examples.
Posted by: Axecleaver | Apr 18, 2006 at 12:12
There are probably are a lot of players who want gold buyers to be punished, but there are clearly a lot of players who buy gold. RMT is a fact of games, and I don't think it's ever been hard to punish the buyers--it's just that it's a slippery slope that most companies wouldn't want to climb onto.
WoW just banned 5000 accounts give or take. Clearly they were mostly going after the 'sploiters, but they left the customers alone (they could be out quite a few accounts if they decided to start banning gold purchasers).
I don't buy gold, but I agree with the policy. By going after the producers you screw with their economy of scale, but you don't have to worry about losing 100,000 customers all at once (and worrying that they have friends that will follow). I still suspect that a gold dupe was found in WoW, that may have been patched by now. But gold recently dropped to less than $3/100 on a lot of servers, which is pretty suspicious. I think that's what was behind a lot of the bannings.
Anyway, I wish RF Online in their bid to curtail RMT but I fear they may be hurting themselves with such a draconian tone (turn your pusher in or we come for you--WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE.... sounds like some folks from the DEA are working there).
Posted by: illovich | Apr 18, 2006 at 12:50
James Grimmelmann:> ....set up a no-questions asked system that flatly deleted any duped/farmed plat from the servers, no matter whose hands it had made its way into?
Setting aside the problems of identifying duped vs farmed plat, how would I handle such a system?
1) Find a friend that's planning to leave the game. That friend acts as the buyer.
2) Spread the money FAST, as it's hard to determine what a RMT favor is and what a friendly "guildmate twinking" is. Have the original "buyer" account handle most of the transactions. Buy from people you don't like- you'll have the goods, they'll have nothing.
3) Trade the goods to the players that want them.
4) Just to make the devs go crazy, give away about 20% of what you buy to innocents all over... any blanket-bannings will be so sure to affect so many "innocents" that the entire policy will come under question.
5) As the final bit of irony, make alot of purchases on NPC merchants, so the devs are deleting coin from themseleves. Then resell the goods for 'clean cash'
Posted by: Chas York | Apr 18, 2006 at 16:24
I guess true isolationist enchiridions of development will have to resort to utilizing currencies that are fundamentally or at least abstractly non-transmissible. About the only such commodity I can concieve of is social curency, or trust. Of course, that's only because someone more creative hasn't come along and confided a superior idea to my care.
The slippery thing about currencies, especially those incipiently concieved as universalizable is that they lend themselves so very amiably to narrative. They are after all the foremost modernist languages.
Posted by: genericdefect | Apr 18, 2006 at 19:41
"Game devs hate being likened to governments. Which is weird when they act so much like law enforcement, and adopt the same conventions of oversight, punishment, control, bigger-weapons-than-the-criminals-they-kill, et cetera et cetera."
Exactly! I still don't understand why it isn't that obvious to most devs that they really should integrate their existence into the fiction, instead of breaking their own fiction every time they need to intervene (ultimately decreasing immersion and often decreasing "fun" amongst players).
Early text-based games you interacted with the "Devs" and they often had fiction-based their powers as the Gods, Wizards, and/or Political Lords of their kingdoms. Some had great IC presence even in performing "mundane maintenance tasks".
Why don't we see this as often in the graphical worlds? What is the difference here in that the devs aren't willing to add their doings into the fiction? The only examples I can come up of exceptions are some of Lord British's doings in Ultima Online and some of the interactions with the Ringers in Puzzle Pirates.
Posted by: WorldMaker | Apr 19, 2006 at 00:48
For a game that has as clear a "No RMT" policy as this appears to be, the solution is simple: remove player-to-player trading, period.
Is it really that hard to design an in-gaming trading system that operates with NO direct player-to-player contact whatsoever? Remove the ability for players to pass game assets directly fom hand to hand and all you are left with is RMT of accounts, which generally seems to be a much smaller problem.
Once a developer has made the decision not to allow (explicitly or complicitly) RMTs, Surely it would be easier to lock them out at the design stage, rather than play virtual policeman after the fact?
Posted by: Bhagpuss | Apr 19, 2006 at 04:22
3. Game devs hate being likened to governments. Which is weird when they act so much like law enforcement, and adopt the same conventions of oversight, punishment, control, bigger-weapons-than-the-criminals-they-kill, et cetera et cetera. << Except... you know, when they don't mind. To say ALL game devs is... you know, a fallacy.
"'...a couple of game-masters also treated the transgressors to some in-game punishment, climbing into some pimped-out mechsuits to deliver swift one-shots to the criminal characters. Not only that, but they got it all down on video, which you can watch via a link at this MMORPG.com post." << Which was rather fun. They did their own karaoke! (Which was bad, it generally is.) Granted this may be an obscure referance however, the dot hack legend of the twilight bracelet anime (which is set in an mmorgp) had public player deletions. As a concept, it's not that bad an idea.
"For a game that has as clear a "No RMT" policy as this appears to be, the solution is simple: remove player-to-player trading, period." << For an open minded academic this is... disappointing. There is no need to go to such extremes and so long as the game masters are willing to add policing to their list of duties, good for them. The fact of the matter is that they control that world and as there are laws humans are expected to obey, just because the dev team didn't explicitly prevent you from doing so doesn't mean it's legal. NOR should the belief that it is save you entirely from punishment. (Just because you didn't KNOW being an axe murder was illegal doesn't mean you are innocent.)
Posted by: Idyll | Apr 19, 2006 at 05:25
WorldMaker>I still don't understand why it isn't that obvious to most devs that they really should integrate their existence into the fiction
It's not the fiction that's the problem, it's the characterisation that developers are governments. They're not, they're gods.
(I presented a paper about this last year in Milwaukee, but the wheels of publication grind slowly...).
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Apr 19, 2006 at 07:29
They're only gods if they want to proclaim themselves to be -- and then be the ones looked to as sole problem-solvers everytime something needs doing. After all, with gods hanging around, why should individuals do more than complain?
IMO, devs proclaiming themselves to be gods in-world is sub-optimal and unhealthy for them and the players both. It effectively infantalizes the players, eventually breeding a form of servile cynicism in them, rather than encouranging and enabling them to grow more substantive social structures beyond small gangs and tribes (aka guilds). And in the devs it often engenders a type of frustrated egotism like that seen in petulant 14yo Dungeon Masters whose plans go awry. It also hamstrings any world fiction, limiting it by the conduct and imagination of the worst of the devs, and to the shallowest, most derivative and ultimately unsatisfying fantasy tropes. This pattern has been played out hundreds of times in text MUDs and earlier graphical MMOs, and only now seems to be fading (note the conspicuous and welcome lack of cult of personality surrounding the Blizzard devs for example).
Now an MMO where the devs really were gods -- say, a Greek mythos with specialities, limitations, and divine politics -- could be interesting (A Tale in the Desert probably comes closest to this, though it is curiously monotheistic in this respect -- there's only one Pharaoh). But I think that's not what's typically meant when people equate devs with gods.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Apr 19, 2006 at 09:33
Mike Sellers wrote:
IMO, devs proclaiming themselves to be gods in-world is sub-optimal and unhealthy for them and the players both. It effectively infantalizes the players, eventually breeding a form of servile cynicism in them, rather than encouranging and enabling them to grow more substantive social structures beyond small gangs and tribes (aka guilds). And in the devs it often engenders a type of frustrated egotism like that seen in petulant 14yo Dungeon Masters whose plans go awry. It also hamstrings any world fiction, limiting it by the conduct and imagination of the worst of the devs, and to the shallowest, most derivative and ultimately unsatisfying fantasy tropes.
I strongly disagree. Like virtually every design decision, in-role Godhood is right for some worlds, and not right for others. I believe one of the primary reasons for the success of ours is that our devs play in-role Gods complete with political influence rooted in choices made by players, formal religious Orders, and so on. Players absolutely love it, and I can tell you that one of my own most transcendent gaming experiences came from promotion to Archpriest by an in-role dev/God a decade ago.
To make sweeping claims about the possible faults of a dev-God system is like saying, "No games should have PvP because it can cause this problem, and that problem, and that problem" without understanding that there are solutions out there for many of those problems.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Apr 19, 2006 at 12:11
Alienating a large percentage of your customer base is never a good thing -- especially when you're punishing them because of your own poor game design which fosters the RMT market.
Posted by: hikaru | Apr 19, 2006 at 13:00
Matt, I think it's safe to say that the depth to which you apply the god-role in your game -- complete, as you say, with religious orders, political influence, etc. -- is far from the norm. This is the kind of thing I was referring to with the possibility of a game where the devs fill out the Greek pantheon (as one example). So yes, handled well, this could add a lot to a game. But such handling is vanishingly rare, in my experience.
Richard's statement that devs aren't government, "they're gods" echoes the long-standing view of developers as wizard/implementor/god, but without the gameplay you've built in your instance. So I stand by what I said above: I've seen the relationship between dev-ascendant and player-mortal fester into social pathology more times than I can count.
Unless they're specifically cast as gods complete with all the trappings and responsibilities (as it sounds like you've done), then devs are no more gods of online worlds than Imagineers are gods of Disneyland. Until we shake these delusions of grandeur out of our heads, we'll continue to be faced with the same design and support issues, and the same levels of rancor and cynicism aimed at the devs that have been seen in most MMOs thus far.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Apr 19, 2006 at 15:37
Mike Sellers>They're only gods if they want to proclaim themselves to be
No: they're gods whether they want to be or not. That's their tragedy.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Apr 20, 2006 at 04:02
I found it well bizarre that RFO opted for gameplay that seems to require miners stay connected for hours on end doing nothing but watching their character mine ore... they've created a failure condition for their players right there. They prohibit unattended play, yet, design a game that requires just that.
I don't know if any of you saw it, but two RFO game masters recently produced an AVI video of themselves trouncing macroers before banning them. It appears they teleported them ontop of a mountain where they couldn't escape, clobbered them with their high-level mech characters, then taunted them with "have fun in WoW" and "thanks for playing RFO". The video was replete with rap music and was a total ego massage for these two GM's.
C'mon guys, speaking here even as a career exploiter, I'm much more professional than this. This ranks up there with my getting called a "pimp" by the GMs in Lineage II. :D RFO has apparently hired, as Mike Seller's alludes, 14 year old dungeon masters who get upset when their plans go awry. If they catch someone cheating, they should boot their character and send them a termination email, matter-of-factly and without the grade-school drama. If I were with RFO, I'd be a bit concerned about the image my customer support reps were putting forth, in-game and out, dealing with exploiters or otherwise.
Posted by: Mithra | Apr 21, 2006 at 12:26
Thanks for the warning, but I had no intention of trying out RFO anyway. Indeed, I recently cancelled my WoW account, and have lost interest in MMORPGs. I have had more than enough of being forced to play the way "the designers intended." When I pay for something, I expect to have it my own way.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 22, 2006 at 04:00
I'm in total agreement with Mithra's post 2 above mine.
Fortunately, RFO is doing horrendously anyway, has gotten terrible reviews, and will probably go the way of Asheron's Call 2 shortly.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | Apr 25, 2006 at 16:13