DeRMTingWoW
In the latest exchange, we see Tobold proposing a thought experiment on RMT. Catch up on the previous steps in the debate here:
In his post, Tobold suggests basically choosing between a WoW with limited to no trade, and WoW with an RMT service and a few other features — bind on equip instead of pickup, mostly — and labels this as his interpretation of my idea. FWIW, I don’t think he quite got what I was saying. I said in the previous post, the issue is actually incentive structures in the game design. That was pretty vague. So here’s my take on what would be needed to make these games more RMT-resistant.
- Remove all stats from all equipment.
- There is no step #2.
This design advice is worth exactly what it is priced at on the tin. But there’s some justification after the fold:
Incentive structures
“People do things because they have incentive.” It’s a brutal way to look at the world. Profoundly discouraging, damaging to your faith in the goodness of human nature. Get used to it, it’s the default position of a game designer. š
Near as I can tell, people RMT in these games because
- they want to complete collections, have a mount, etc
- they want to keep up with their friends
- they need gear in order to play the next bit of game — crossing a game gate
Problem #1
Problem #1 is about a self-directed game goal. This is not a problem. It’s a design opportunity. You should provide more goals, and ideally, change the ways of getting them to something that contributes back to the game community. Give them the mount magically when they reach the right level.
Problem #2
This is because you went and built a Diku clone. Don’t want to change that part? So implement sidekicking and mentoring. Allow powerlevelling a bit more — it doesn’t demonstrably reduce subscriber revenue, since the people are there for their friends. Accept that your game is not solely about content, and have faith in that to retain people. And you have faith in your endgame, yes?
Problem #3
To get rid of 90% of the obnoxiousness around RMT, fix problem #3. People want to play. You are not letting them. You are making them collect a plot coupon in order to get further in the story. A writing teacher would flog you publicly. But that’s what RPGs do. They gate content. OK, so gate it based on character progression. That is the point of an RPG. WoW has such an incredibly rich character build system that having any at all in the gear is kind of moot anyway
What is equipment for?
- It’s supposed to be tools, something you choose optionally. You are supposed to be assembling the right set of tools for the job, and a proper tool lets you do something you couldn’t before, it’s a new ability.
- It’s potentially also a trophy, so you can show off stuff you have accomplished.
- It is instead being used, in the land of bound equipment, as stats.
Remove all stats beyond the most insignificant from gear. Make equipment trophies and tools. If you can look at your game and say “more than 1% of my character’s ability comes from stuff that I am wearing” then your game will have RMT.
Would that change the Diku-based game beyond all imagining? No. Oh, players would need to adapt for a bit, because they are used to getting half their advancement from levels shaped like vambraces. Just give it to them in levels instead. Let them save the vambraces for the trophy aspect.
The thought experiment is simple. Imagine that gear gave no stats at all. Would anyone RMT in it? No. Would everyone still have gear? Yes. There’d even still be a thriving market on the auction house, because the gear is still varied in appearance, varied as trophies, etc. But it is now only a luxury good, instead of being in the gameplay path. The effect is to make all gear a matter of personal choice.
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on words currently but I’ll start out by wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. I’m currently reading on the dialogue between Tobold and Ralph Koster about the idea of RMT and game design theory. To begin with, let me intro with this article that sums upboth of their dialogues. RMT, real-money trading, is the idea that virtual commodities will gain real-world currency value. The idea of RMT is quite controversial. On the one hand it provides casual users to engage in more content without having to do as much work by not
āPeople do things because they have incentive.ā Itāsa brutal way to look at the world. Profoundly discouraging, damaging to your faith in the goodness of human nature. Get used to it, itās the default position of a game designer. ā¦ full storyhere
Tobold andRaphhave been having a cross-blog discussion re: RMT that has went over all the common territory very thoroughly and relatively concisely, I think.Ā My own views on RMT kind of fall between the two extremes, but instead of going into all of that, I
I think your opening statement is a misnomer. It’s not about removing relevant stats from gear. It’s about removing much of the DIKU from the DIKU š
If you make advancement all event-based, you’re changing the primary motivation of play from hitting numbers to completing tasks. WoW and EQ2 both did a good job here in that the bulk of XP comes from the quest turn in, rather than the mobs you killed along the way. I consider SWG mission terminals sort of a proto version of this. Though they were mostly rinse/repeat, they at least wrapped the grind in some narrative. Sure people will AOE kite anyway, but they’re not progressing near as much faster as they would have in EQ1.
Further, in both modern DIKUs, you can get fairly well equipped with quest rewards alone. This will get you to the endgame. You’re back to the old Raid ways to progress beyond, but even in easy-to-level-cap WoW, most people are really not Raiding.
I still think the concept of levels and abilities locked behind them makes sense as a longterm reward, and a way to customize a character. But stat-less gear would be an interesting experiment to try.
Unfortunately, it needs the scale of at least an EQ2 success to really tell us if it’s viable. And I’m not sure anyone who’s got the money to make a DIKU is going to take that risk.
So, we need to extend our view beyond the AAA purchase/install variety, to games with much success but which a) have no gear; and, b) maintain meta-goals and rewards. These other games change the idea of persistent customization to something more aesthetic-based, either on their character(s) or in their virtual dwelling. And they work as well.
Unfortunately, none of the successful ones really have any appeal to the crowd currently getting all up in arms about RMT š
Why? Habbo is viable. And well, chess is viable. Another option, but somewhat more damaging is to create the No Feedback Game. LOL š
Ah, well, I wasn’t trying to redesign the game from the ground up. I presume people like WoW and want to keep it as intact as possible. I know from experience that minimizing stats on the eq really does not have that big an impact on the game as a whole. It’s still very much a Diku. Many well-run Dikus had very firm rules for content builders about these things.
You don’t need to make it totally statless, either. You just need to keep it minimal.
You would significantly reduce RMT, perhaps — not eliminate it.
Guild Wars has a level cap of 20; as of the first expansion pack, you could hit that in a fairly-busy weekend. If you got a pre-order pack, you could have ‘maximum’ weapons on the start. There are a few purchase items that are pretty much required — a couple runes and max armor — but by and large, you’re set if you do a couple quests. Getting “Max” stuff is fairly simple and not all that expensive, compared to DIKU games.
… and they have RMT. Why? My feeling is: *Prestige* items. For example, for 65000 gold and a heck of a lot of rare resources you can get armor that is exactly as functional as the 6500 gold armor, but with a different skin.
I would doubt, however, that the RMT in Guild Wars is in any way comparable to the RMT in WoW et al, even with the relative games populations taken into account — but don’t underestimate the effect of prestige, once stats are no longer a concern.
I must admit, though, that I love playing a game where I know there’s a cap and I know that I’m at it.
True, you can also make eq consumables, easy to get, but rot quickly. Like regents or focal objects for magic. Items you need to enable skills to kick in. Or make cloths containers for such focal objects. E.g. in order to cast a spell you need a black coat, a handkerchief, and a fresh yellow flower in the right pocket. Etc. Then getting them in a timely fashion becomes the issue, which means knowledge of the environment rather than hoarding.
Trevel, that’s problem #1. Make lots more choices available, of varying difficulty to get, and you’ll get less demand for the 65000gp armor.
Raph, you said earlier that tubs of black dye in UO were traded on eBay for substantial sums of money. Did black dye confer any stats? I never played UO, so I don’t know.
In Guild Wars, dye (which does not confer stats) was one of the most sought-after items in the early economy.
For much of the time I played WoW, the trade channel was clogged with people looking for an enchanter who could give them the “red glow weapon enchant.” They had no idea what the enchant was called, much less what stats it had. They simply wanted their weapon to have a cool, red glow like that guy they just saw run past.
Don’t many Asian MMOs directly sell items to their users that have stat value, but are merely cosmetic?
It would seem to me that appearance and prestige are, if anything, more powerful motivators for many players than stats are, and that they are thus even more likely to lead to RMT. Am I missing something obvious from your plan, here? I’m genuinely asking because I often overlook the obvious.
āPeople do things because they have incentive.ā
That right there is definitely the crux, people do things because they feel the need to do so. If their behaviour appears “irrational” (meaning, it does not logically follow from their apparent motivations), you’ve failed to understand their real motivations. In this case, they are failing to play the game for the same motivations as Tobold. He fails to see that many players are not playing for the same reasons as he is, and feels that it is the designer’s responsibility to make them play the “right way”. We know where *that* dance ends.
Beyond that, what Raph describes (not attaching stats/abilities to characters in the form of bind-on-drop equipment) is entirely possible in a Diku-derived game, in fact it’s most of what happens in Camelot with Realm Levels and Master Levels.
–Dave
“Haha, he paid 100USD for black dye? What a moron.” Not a big threat to the power hierarchy?
funcro, black dye did absolutely nothing to stats. It went for crazy prices on eBay because it was the result of a bug. Once we added black dye to the game officially, then the eBaying of it went away mostly.
Prices (and RMT) are driven by scarcity. That’s why in UO the top thing to buy was always a house, because there weren’t enough plots of land for everyone.
So, in the context of this discussion, would you consider LotRO’s direct connection of character traits to in-game achievements (the Merits and Deeds system) a step forward, backward, or sideways?
Also, I think Maple Story is an argument both for and against the core premise. It shows that people will pay real money for graphical fluff, but on the other hand that in itself demonstrates (as does Guild Wars) that strong motivation and desire exists even in a stat-free context.
I agree, while achieving intermediate goals is nice and keeps you motivated to drive for more…..after 2+ years of never getting to stop and say ‘I did it!’ for even 2 seconds has gotten really old.
Eventually the donkey is going to stop lumbering forwards towards the carrot…
…and flop over dead from starvation.
Raph wrote:
You have stated before that real money can be exchanged for both in-game goods and services; however, in the statement above, you seem to have forgotten about the services. I don’t think RMT is the result of solely content gating. As I wrote before, disposable income among gamers is increasing as gamers advance in age. That’s certainly another factor that contributes to the acceptance and use of real money to further personal interests in virtual worlds and online games.
Morgan, the “it” I meant was the gear, not the game.
My goal here wasn’t to get rid of RMT, it was to get rid of the nasty gold farming effects while changing the game as little as possible.
Yep, services would remain. So would RMT for collectibles. To which I mostly shrug.
Surprisingly, what you propose is pretty much exactly what Ā»The Chronicles of SpellbornĀ« does (or intends to do, as it isn’t released yet). They don’t have stats on items and intend to deliver many choices. I think it will be the closest to see how it turns out.
Raph wrote:
Never use the word "it"! š
I think your next post should be about adding/supporting more RMT to a virtual world or online game.
I think this whole discussion is missing something. For all modern MMOs, or at least all of the ones I’ve played anyways, money==time. And anytime that equation holds true you will have RMT, because for some class of player it will cost less than his time is worth. But you need RMT to keep that player, because, in general, he won’t want to be “wasting” his time.
Want to get rid of most RMT? Get rid of the artificial time gate of money sinks or gear farming. Sure, you’ll still have RMT for ‘prestige’ items, but I don’t see that as anywhere near the problem that RMT traded for time is.
That design is pretty much how City of Heroes/Villains works, which I am sure you are aware of. CoH/CoV do have some rare enhancement sets, which can be a bit pricey to obtain and I could think that could give some incentive for people to buy some infamy/influence to obtain the necessary components for those sets. Still, they are not required components to progress in the game.
If there is RMT in CoH/CoV I have yet to encounter it in-game or seen any negative effects from it. That is more than I can say about other MMOGs that I have played and for shorter time than CoH/CoV.
People do buy influence for cash, because influence can buy some stuff. But CoX does stand as an example of a fun game not entirely dependent on raw stats and the gear that adjusts them. It just isn’t a huge success either though.
I don’t want folks thinking I’m overly harping on the idea of success. But I do think it important to consider when trying to “solve” problems in this genre. The more successful a title, the more likely its ideas will be emulated by others looking to get a piece of the action, seeing certain features as a “demand” they can provide a supply for.
Unfortunately, some games that have had really good ideas which would work in any DIKU, haven’t really be big enough to create that demand, so they languish. For example, being able to teleport players to you, being able to sidekick up and down, being able to customize your appearance without affecting your abilities, all of this stuff is fantastic. But the demand hasn’t reached a crescendo for them to become standard.
Hehe, that’s where I said “none of the successful ones really have any appeal to the crowd currently getting all up in arms about RMT”. Club Penguin, Habbo, Audition, all have lots of accounts. None are built the same way as WoW though, and there’s really not a lot of crossover between the audiences for those and the DIKU crowd (in my opinion of course, but it seems to be the case).
So these ideas need to find their way into a game that would also appeal to this audience, or we won’t ever know if they’re viable for this audience.
Just my opinion, but I think this is a step sideways. It definitely allows players to customize their characters further (as they confer new abilities and displayable things like titles). They also can’t be traded at all. But they are another part of what a character does achieve and there is a certain amount of scarcity to it (depending on spawns and resources). So it doesn’t solve achievement, but it can’t be touched by RMT (unless the character itself is sold).
Kerri Knight: Eventually the donkey is going to stop lumbering forwards towards the carrotā¦
…and start building it’s own virtual world… š
(Forgive me, I don’t pay close attention to these discussions, so someone may have already made a point similar to this.)
Why does currency have to be the same kind of hard asset it is in the real world? To fight the RMT problem, if it is possible, you probably have to focus on things that are uniquely controllable in a virtual world, since bartering and markets naturally emerge in reality…
What if a given piece of gold only had a life-span of, say, three transactions? This would limit gold from bouncing around an RMT market fairly dramatically: a player could get it from an NPC and spend it at an NPC shop, or optionally give it to a friend, but that friend would then only be able to directly spend it at an NPC shop. A player could sell objects to other players, but the purchaser would have to be the one who earned the money spent, and the vendor could only spend earned money at an NPC shop.
To support this you would clearly need an item system that didn’t allow easy money-laundering via NPCs. Also, this doesn’t prevent the simplest form of gold-farming, although it does make it more burdensome since each farmer would need to execute transactions using the farming character rather than funneling it through a central RMT representative (which I assume is what happens now…)
I suppose this is basically the closest you can get to making gold bind-on-pickup, and I don’t actually know if it would work, but it seems like an interesting idea… Would currency even be useful if it had this sort of restriction? Does it overly restrict a virtual economy, or is something this drastic required to prevent RMT from emerging? Would measures like this actually have an effect on RMT, or would people find some way around it? (Obviously the rest of the economy needs to be designed in concert with this approach…) A very interesting problem.
“What if a given piece of gold only had a life-span of, say, three transactions? This would limit gold from bouncing around an RMT market fairly dramatically: a player could get it from an NPC and spend it at an NPC shop, or optionally give it to a friend, but that friend would then only be able to directly spend it at an NPC shop. A player could sell objects to other players, but the purchaser would have to be the one who earned the money spent, and the vendor could only spend earned money at an NPC shop.”
That undermines the first principle of currency: Fungibility. A gold coin on its first incarnation would be worth much more than one on its second (because the former could be traded again after the transaction). And one on its third would be worth nothing to another player, because it couldn’t be transferred.
What you would wind up with was something else becoming the player-to-player currency, and gold being used only for NPC transactions. Then RMT would focus on the alternate currency. You’re sweeping back the tide, any way you slice it.
–Dave
[…] I posted a link to the first post in this series earlier, but Raph Koster has another post up about removing Real-Money Transactions from MMOGs. While I still feel he’s a little bit off-kilter on some of his basic assumptions (an […]
[…] I posted a link to the first post in this series earlier, but Raph Koster has another post up about removing Real-Money Transactions from MMOGs. While I still feel he’s a little bit off-kilter on some of his basic assumptions (an […]
Which is why I emphasize that “the rest of the economy needs to be designed in concert with this approach.” If every object in the world had a trading lifespan like this, then there wouldn’t be anything that could become a de facto currency. If everything is perishable, I suspect RMTing might become vanishingly effective. It makes it impossible to maintain the kind of huge asset pools that I imagine a large successful RMT broker needs.
I’m not really sure why you mention that fungibility is the first principle of currency. (Admittedly, not being a currency expert, I may not fully understand the implications or even the full definition of fungibility…) In the real world I agree that fungibility is useful for a currency: my dollar bill should be equivalent to your dollar bill in every meaningful way. Things just get too complicated otherwise. However, in a virtual world where value rules are reliably enforced by a server I don’t think it’s as important.
Liquidity is also impacted by limited-transfer currency, but I don’t think perishability ruins the utility of currency entirely. It still serves a purpose for players and can still be useful. It also allows limited transfer of value between friends, which I think is absolutely vital to a strong social experience.
One possible RMTer laundering scheme that could work under my scheme would be as follows: buy some item from an NPC using end-life gold, and then sell that item back to the NPC for fresh gold. This laundering can be discouraged in several ways. One would be to mark the items purchased with perished gold as perished themselves; don’t provide any means for the players to convert perished objects to their non-perished equivalents. This seems a little extreme, but would certainly prevent laundering of the form described above.
Another approach would be to allows it, but make sure that it’s a very non-zero-sum transaction: purchasing the item from the NPC should cost a lot more than the value gained by selling it. (Just as many, if not all, games do now.) This would mean it’s possible to launder perished money, but at a significant cost. The question is whether it would introduce enough friction to prevent RMTs; I think the answer is no but that maybe you don’t have to prevent it entirely, just make it inconvenient enough so it’s not very common, particularly on large scales. (Although given the persistence of many RMTers in games like WoW, this would have to be very inconvenient indeed…)
(Maybe the trick isn’t to kill RMT, it’s to keep it from scaling well?)
As long as you have something people want and a way to get it to someone else you will have RMT.
Gear, abilities, tools, skills, time, tokens…whatever – if it isn’t free or easy to get, people will pay money for it.
Compared to other games the time between expansions in WoW is relatively long, and the time to level up is relatively short. Thus in WoW many people spend a lot of time at the current level before the next expansion comes out. They keep playing because they can still (slowly) improve their characters by acquiring better and better gear. While I’m certainly known for ranting about raiding being not accessible enough, I do think that removing raiding would harm WoW’s popularity. And if you remove all stats from all equipment, the raiding game is pretty much dead.
I would love a little bit more “world” MMO in WoW, but I believe that the “game” MMO for the achievers is driving subscription numbers here (note the difference between paid subscription and free membership for something like Habbo Hotel). I don’t think a WoW with stat-free equipment would have anything like 9 million subscribers.
On the other hand removing stats from gear nicely solves the RMT problem. Very few people would object to others spending money on gear that just looks good, but doesn’t advance them in the game. Hey, even I bought a house in UO on EBay (although I considered the game not having enough space for everybody to place a house to be bad game design).
I don’t think the rate of expansion releases has anything to do with the game design proper… it would be trivial to add levels to the top of WoW current stuff, where the new raid content goes, to provide ongoing feedback and rewards. Or provide an alternate advancement ladder, such as “raid levels” or something.
I definitely do not think that I am proposing removing raiding. Raiding is not about the gear rewards, and it would be just as fun with another decent reward.
I also don’t see why another reward substituted in for the stat gear would result in a loss of subs. Remember, the stat gear is not really gear — it’s actually levels. It is lying to the player about its true nature.
In other words, the player can still advance in the game just as much as they do now. They are just advancing with stuff that can’t be sold.
UO not having enough room for houses was indeed bad. Lots of reasons. š
So far the discussion of RMT seems to focus on convinience. Ok, so now newbie-players purchase characters instead of equipment… You might claim that equipment == levels, but you might also claim that characters == equipment. Wholesale bypassing is more annoying than players making smaller upgrades RMT. Take away the smaller upgrades and you encourage big upgrades.
In a PvP game, RMT makes the game corrupt. Some of the fun in a PvP game is that after being humiliated you go plan your revenge and work towards that end (timed consumables are a good thing IMO as you’ll have to pick the target you “hate” the most. LOL.). I don’t want to play a PvP game where you have to pay to get your revenge… That sucks and smells of extortion.
I’m curious about why you think that gear giving no stats would stop RMT. Look at things like the black dye in UO that you mentioned in earlier posts. People were paying a great deal of $ for it and it has no gameplay value at all. It just looks cool as hell and demand outstrips supply.
Stat-less gear might further reduce RMT, and might even FURTHER reduce whining about RMT because it gave little in the way of in-game mechanical advantages. But, I submit that so long as there is anything in the world that is difficult to acquire, there will people willing to invest the time in-game to get it and other people willing to invest time they spent elsewhere, represented by money, into getting whatever.
If stuff in your game has a hierarchy of value, there will always be someone willing to pay money in the place of time for some of that stuff.
Just give up on even trying. RMT will never go away, and if it did, it would be because the game was so un-fun to play, that no one would play it. The only thing left to try then would be to flood the world with so many awesomely rad item’s that those who RMT would either go broke buying them and stop playing, or get so rich they would stop playing while they negotiated to buy a small island off Hawaii.
Akkori, I don’t know if you were just poking fun, but you actually touched on one of the main problems of RMT.
That statement totally contradicts itself. If a game is fun, then nobody would RMT. They’d just play it. If parts of a game are not fun, then people RMT over those parts to get to the fun. (And of course if none of the game is fun, then nobody plays it, and it doesn’t even fit into the equation. š )
You’re assuming that all games are, and have to be, fun because they’re games. Ignoring the fact that one person’s fun is another person’s misery, the most significant problem with RMT [or more specifically, discussions about RMT] is that many people fail to think critically, relying on untested and often fantastical assumptions. Either-or and us-versus-them fallacies are two of the most popular, regardless of whether the argument is about causation or consequence.
Unfortunately, nothing truly serious has yet been written on the subject, at least specific to online games and virtual worlds. The closest materials are those written about gambling and psychology. At a basic level, you also have to look to the information gathered on why people appropriate resources to anything, including both worthwhile and trivial goods and services. Of course, this also means looking beyond economics and marketing to philosophy where such concepts as altruism and egoism provide valuable insight into what motivates people to act.
Now, to directly reply to your statement, I bet you weren’t thinking of a transaction involving three people, namely a buyer, a player, and a seller. Good Johnny plays Game X because, being sick, Game X gives him an opportunity to meet up with his real-world friends who aren’t allowed to visit. Good Johnny wants the Big Bad Sword of Badness and extra character levels so that he can catch up with his friends who advanced in Game X when Good Johnny went to the hospital.
Good Johnny, however, figures out that the Big Bad Sword of Badness is an extremely scarce item and that obtaining extra levels means playing long and hard hours earning experience points because his friends are still advancing in Game X while he tries to catch up with them. Scary Larry approaches Good Johnny with the Big Bad Sword of Badness and an opportunity to quickly gain extra levels, but Scary Larry wants real-world cash in exchange. Good Johnny agrees, but doesn’t have the money. Scary Larry says he’ll hold off on selling what Good Johnny wants for a week until Good Johnny has enough money.
Luckily for Good Johnny, Aunt Velma who loves Good Johnny visits and Good Johnny tells her about his predicament. Aunt Velma doesn’t understand the whole online thing but she feels sorry that Good Johnny can’t go outside and play with his friends, so Aunt Velma pays Scary Larry. Aunt Velma feels good about herself, Good Johnny is happy, and Scary Larry is satisfied.
Erm…no either-or falacies here. Actually I was thinking of Bejeweled when I said that. š Nobody RMTs a high score in Bejeweled because actually playing it is fun. And yes, games have to be fun. We’ve seen what happens to games that are otherwise.
That directly applies to your, erm, interesting example of Johnny. (I notice your examples of RMTers tend to be either chronically ill or brave heroes saving lives.) In fact, you make my point for me. The fun is playing with friends and having the Big Bad Sword of Badness. The non-fun is the long and hard hours earning experience points. So we cut the long and hard hours earning experience points, and just let Johnny play with friends, and have the Big Bad Sword of Badness. Why the heck not? Let’s save those dev resources making more and more stuff that’s fun. Then everybody is satisfied. š
The point is that what motivates people to act is not always what you presume as truth. Most people who are not comfortable with RMT frame the discussion as a us-versus-them-ism, or UTism. “We’re normal players. They’re not normal. We play fair. They don’t. We’re Westerners. They’re Easterners. We play by the rules. They break them. If they’re not like us, they’re against us.”
That’s not what I was saying. The desire for “fun” is never “always integral” to what motivates people to act. Can you think of any other reasons why Johnny would want to meet up with friends? Why he needed the Big Bad Sword of Badness or the extra levels? Was he buying those in-game goods and services to have fun or to meet up with his friends? Try this.
Neat test. I especially like how it says we bring our own inferences to the table. For example, I’m not necessarily against RMT at all, yet you preach to me as though I am. š
True, but it is the reason for playing a game. I’m trying to find another reason besides “fun” to play games. To survive? Um…for sex? Because lions will eat us if we don’t? I give up. Gimme a reason to play a game besides fun; you know something I don’t know.
Meanwhile, we seem to be arguing two different things here. You have many general arguments to advocate RMT, and that’s super. I’m saying “This certain gameplay sucks. Cut it. Spend those man-hours developing something else.” Johnny needed the sword in order to have fun (or to avoid being eaten by lions, or what have you). He needed the levels too, but I’m emphasizing the sword because it ties into Raph’s topic. I say let all players start the game with that sword if they want.
At this point, the only reason the sword exists is to support RMT. Again, I’m not against RMT; I’m against spending dev hours on the time sinks required to get the sword. Let’s not develop the sword-quest at all if players need to RMT it in order to have fun. Let Johnny have his sword! ;D
By the way, I enjoyed this discussion very much, and while we were certainly “argueing”, I never thought we were really “fighting”. Of course the limitations of discussing via blog entries tends to blow up disagreements out of proportion.
If I understood him right, Raph and me agree that the amount of RMT in a game can be modified very much by changing the game design. That is already a very strong common point. I get far more annoyed by devs with an “my game was perfect until the gold farmers ruined it” attitude. Game design affects player behavior and desires. Why Johnny needs the Big Bad Sword of Badness or the extra levels depends on whether the game design determines that not having them separates him from his friends. The gold farmers just follow the demand, and the demand is caused by game design.
> Remove all stats beyond the most insignificant from gear.
I think you’d have to go one step further. You’d have to severely blunt the power curve in general. Removing all useful stats from gear would still leave RMT for powerleveling services.
People ought to get used to the idea that RMT and traditional DIKU design go hand-in-hand. If you gate content by time, at all, people with more money than time will be willing to pay. There’s not much you can do about it, without making the game into something not-DIKU.
I think the point about RMT, “powerlevelling” and “gold farmers” is that “gold farming” is disruptive to other people’s gameplay, while “powerlevelling” really only affects the person who pays for it.
There are other side-effects of RMT in the real world, but those are not really points of discussion for gameplay design.
And yes, “gold farmers” exist because of scarcity. How disruptive they are depends on how scarce the resources people want to get are.
In City of Heroes, Influence is in fact remarkably easy to come by, and even the most powerful Enhancement Inventions don’t boost the character’s abilities by so much that they’re “must-have” items. Costume parts are easily available, and powers are inherent in the character not the gear.
As a result, “influence farmers” in City of Heroes are rare.
If the idea is to reduce RMT in WoW by several orders of magnitude by making only small changes to WoW and its gameplay, how about only allowing trades/gifts between people who have been in the same guild for a week or more?
Richard
Richard:
I would answer that by saying, on principle, that inhibiting socialization is contradictory to the core point of having MMOs. (My bias: my own experience as a lowly player is such that I’m nearly always soloing, and not because I wouldn’t like to group. Social interaction within MMO contexts is frustrating enough as it is.)
I am only speaking in the abstract here, though, and ignoring such philosophical distinctions as profanity filters and the like.
To build on that, though, I personally interpret Raph’s original statements as partly speaking to the fact that RMT is a business transaction that many find repugnant, sure, but one with social components that are worth preserving even in the face of RMT. Parallels can easily be drawn to other abusable liberties, where preservation of the liberty is (much) more valuable than the elimination of the perceived abuse.
I was using the word “you” in a general way.
People play games for many reasons, including and excluding “fun.” In my example, Good Johnny was playing Game X to meet up with his friends. Why did he want to meet up with his friends? I never said, and intentionally left his motivation open to interpretation, hoping that the ambiguity would highlight the fact that the desire for “fun” is only one desire of many.
Perhaps Good Johnny wanted to meet up with friends to hear about a girl he liked? Or maybe he was interested in what was happening in the real world? Regardless, his goal was not to have fun; his goal was to meet up with friends. And he needed to complete several objectives to achieve that goal: a Big Bad Sword of Badness and extra character levels.
RMT made completing those objectives easier, and in his case, possible. He had limited time to catch up with his friends. Without RMT, he would have never had the opportunity to catch up with them. Suppose that his goal was, instead, to experience everything the game has to offer. He would have then played those long and hard hours, obtaining the Big Bad Sword of Badness and extra character levels along the way. As you suggested, RMT can be used to more easily traverse dull content; however, in this case, Good Johnny made use of RMT to achieve his goal in a timely manner.
In other words, you assumed that the long and hard hours earning experience points was “not fun” and thus Good Johnny bypassed that content. What if those long and hard hours earning experience points were actually incredibly entertaining? What if they were the intended focus of the game? Then Good Johnny cheated himself, right? No, not really. His goal differed from the one the designers had planned out for him. But your assumption still harkens back to the idea that “RMT is not playing fair.”
Simulators are games. We just call them simulators because of the notion that games are a means to experience “fun.” If you read Raph’s book, at least in the same way I did, you might have learned that “fun” is a means to an end, and not the end itself. “Fun” motivates learning and we learn for many reasons, but “fun” is not required for us to learn.
Users will always find the unintended uses of a product. The appropriate response is to embrace those alternate uses instead of trying to design them out. Are time sinks really the problem? Or does one segment of the market approve of them while another disapproves? If you change the product in such a drastic way, what’s the approving segment to think? Embracing alternate uses is not about replacing what you already have. Embracing alternate uses is about making more room for more people.
Interesting, but kinda unrealistic. Those goals can be accomplished without grouping in our hypothetical game.
Aha, this is the crux of my argument. What if those hours of earning experience points were more entertaining, enriching, and provided greater social contact for Johnny? What does he need the sword for? Why does he need the levels? Honestly, you make it sound as if Johnny hates meeting his friends, really doesn’t want to, doesn’t care about the sword, and would much rather fight monsters all by himself and stay at the level he’s at. But for some reason, he RMTs his levels and the uber-sword and rushes to meet his friends. Really, it seems to me the only reason Johnny RMTs anything right now is to fit your argument…so I’m rather confused. Give Johnny his sword for free. Don’t make him pay money for it.
This isn’t anything new. Stuff gets cut out of games all the time. Some content doesn’t even make it to the consumer, and dies on the white board. A lot of stuff gets published but goes unfinished. Whole areas are abandoned because players just don’t find them interesting, and devs don’t deem those areas worthy of further attention.
One example is me playing EverQuest about an hour ago, and I thought “Wow, Clan Runnyeye is kinda boring. I wish they’d give it a make-over.” But I understand why they don’t. It’s wasted man-hours, compared to what else they could be doing.
No, timesinks being the only vehicle to progression is. When your only two choices are ‘not fun’ and ‘paying more money than the timesinkers to skip what is not fun’, you start wondering why the folks who enjoy the timesinks are the only ones being catered to. It is as unfair to non-timesinkers to not have an alternative as it is to take the timesinks away from the ones who enjoy them.
But until companies stop trying to all chase the same narrow market segment, I guess we’ll be stuck in mediocrity hell forever.
I’ve also got a serious problem with linear models like WoW, because content becomes trivialized before you can proceed to the next step. Your available selection of all possible activities is a tiny wedge of the pie at any given time.
Different people find different kinds of intellectual challenges easy or hard, enforcing a specific order through levels/stat mods/power creep tends to make any given person’s feeling of being challenged rather random rather than constantly increasing.
Of course, I also prefer the kinds of encounters that feature player group vs. enemy group that features complex enough AI with a balance of randomness and playing off of the players’ moves that the content isn’t static and repetitive. FPS games have had these kinds of encounters for years. ‘Scripted’ AI and power creep end up making 90% of your content trivial to someone who has reached the top, no replayability. So while there is certainly no definitive way to ‘win’, the game just becomes stale, instead.
I’ve only just started on heroics in WoW, I’ve been through them enough times, however, that all I see them as is a vehicle to collect tokens to prepare for Zul’Aman. The challenge isn’t beating the dungeon, the challenge is not quitting from boredom before I reach that goal.
Slyfeind wrote:
Good Johnny’s sick. He’s not allowed outside. All he has is Game X.
To catch up with his friends, with whom he wants to meet up. There’s a point at which you make a sacrifice: entertaining and enriching content with great social contact with people you don’t know, or meeting up with friends.
I don’t know why you’re confused. Johnny wants to meet up with his friends. To do that, he needs the Big Bad Sword of Badness and extra character levels because his friends have advanced in the game beyond him. Because they are continually advancing, Johnny needs to advance even faster. In order to advance faster, he needs elite gear and a powerlevelling service, but because he’s advancing really, really fast, he’s also missing out on the game experience.
Fortunately, Johnny doesn’t care about the entertaining and enriching content with great social contact with people he doesn’t know precisely because what he does care about is meeting up with his friends. Remember: what’s fun to someone is someone else’s misery. You might like the content, but Johnny’s goals are different and thus are his preferences.
If Johnny’s goal was different, if he preferred to advance without the Big Bad Sword of Badness and extra character levels, he would fight monsters all by himself and stay at his current level. But his goal isn’t different.
RMT makes completing goals and objectives outside the given parameters of the game possible. Some people don’t like that others are playing a different game in the same game. In a manner of speaking, they don’t like that printing paper can be made into paper airplanes, an alternate use never intended by the designers.
Johnny is not the only player in the game. I see your argument as “fun is absolute; a game is either fun to everyone or fun to nobody; and without fun, there is no game. If something is not fun to someone, change the entire game.” You seem to be forgetting the facts that you can’t please everyone and that polarizing people is good business. You need to think of a solution that doesn’t involve kicking out one market segment in favor of another.
Small stuff, all the time, sure. Not big stuff, like entire game systems.
Kerri Knight wrote… lots of stuff with which I agree. I can’t relate to the World of Warcraft bits though since I only played up to Level 24, in both the beta and gold editions.
[…] 27, 2007 in General Design Tobold and Raph have been having a cross-blog discussion re: RMT that has went over all the common territory very […]
Maybe. That rather depends how much of the content is (non)instanced. Whereas gold farmers are incentivized to find out-of-the way places with little competition, power-levelers exist right in the critical path.
In WOW, what have you run into more:
gold farmers?
or people cutting in on your quest mobs at light speed with a higher level assist?
If people knew (or thought) those higher level assists were Chinese Power-Levelers, I think they’d generate even higher CS volume than they already do.
Another good article here Raph. I have been thinking along these lines as well- not attaching stats to Gear. This article was a work of art and a marvelous insight into RMT
Off hand I would like to mention Guild Wars. Even though armor has stats on them- the gear is very cheap and easy to acquire. PVP characters actually have all the best gear. The gear you raid for merely looks better and people still does the content for FUN and achievement.
So this concept has been proven. Guild Wars is not a worldy MMO by any means but it is worth mentioning they had a great implementation
[…] was very much not interested in getting involved inĀ the RMT fracas, but a comment I was going to put up on Common Sense Gamer blew into something I had to put up […]
Sounds like UO to me. And you know I always love anything that sounds like UO.
When did UO really fall off of it’s game? When it added stats to items for Age of Shadows. That’s when I quit anyway. Blessed items with stats are never good. You want items with stats? Make them lootable. You want unlootable items? Make them cosmetic only.
I always thought that the guy with the best sword always winning was a crock of shit. Player skill should have some impact.
[…] some kind of consensus … other than ‘RMT is bad’. Raph responds with an even more radical idea: removing stats from gear altogether. His view is that RMT exists because game companies require players to rate their effectiveness […]
If I were going to summarize all of this for someone, I’d say that what we need are new answers for someone asking (imagine the most whiny voice possible here):
“How come he gets to do that and I can’t?”
Examples:
How come my friends can hang out on Uberhard Island and I can’t?
How come xXSkulKrakXx can wear an awesome cloak and I can’t?
How come the members of Guild McLargeHuge can find out what Dr. Nastibad is up to at the bottom of his volcano lair and I can’t?
How come xXSkulKrakXx can kill me but I can’t kill him?
To me, these are both why a lot of folks buy gold, and why a lot of folks that don’t buy gold resent when others do. Thus far, designing a game has involved answering those questions and coding accordingly (because you’re not high enough level/don’t have enough faction/don’t have enough friends/don’t have mad skillz).
Some folks take those answers as the “rules”, and get mad when people “break” them (since hey, they don’t like it either, but those are the rules). Others look at those answers as shortcomings and route around them (yeah, game’s a hell of a grind, but it only takes an extra $20 to jump past the bad parts). Different people playing by different rules, then we all start to frustrate each other by “playing the wrong way” (and we’ve all seen message board drama directed at developers when they break unwritten rules of etiquette or fairness, too).
This crops up everywhere in life, not just games. We’ve all gotten mad when someone got away with breaking what we perceived to be a rule, doubly so if it means we’re now jealous of what that person gained by doing so, even if we’re nothing more than observers to the situation. That may be stating the obvious, but I’m always fascinated by the ways in which the small echoes the large. It’s “just” a general human tendency to take into account.
So, personally, I think the goal could be stated as crafting new (hopefully better) answers to these questions in the design of our games. Does that echo anyone else’s thoughts?
Quick addition to the above: replace “RMT” with “Class Balance” conceptually.
“How come he can solo the Jabberwock and I can’t?”
Neat, huh?
Morgan, I never said fun is an absolute (quite the opposite), nor did I propose cutting entire game systems. (Read again my Clan Runnyeye example.)
We established that Johnny wanted to meet his friends, then hypothesized that Johnny finds more fulfillment in gaining experience, then you change your mind and say he prefers social contact with friends again.
You say the only way he can communicate with his friends is if his avatar in this one specific game can be in close contant with his friends’ avatars, because for some reason telephone, instant messaging, bulletin boards, e-mail, and snail mail are all unavailable to him, and the /tell system in the game is broken or doesn’t exist.
That’s where the confusion is on my end. We’re changing Johnny’s goals in the game world, and at times downright ignoring reality. And you’re constantly falling back on wonderful arguments that would be great for someone who’s generally uninitiated in RMT and even games in general. We know all that stuff, no?
You know, I just thought of another UO-related nugget of truth.
Gold farmers got PKed and their loot taken. There weren’t many gold farmers on UO.
Problem solved in 3 sentences? Amazin.
Slyfeind wrote:
“A trolley, whose brakes have failed, is on a crash course with five people. Another track forks out ahead, where there is only one person. You have the power to change the course of the trolley. You can either choose to save five people while killing one, or you can choose to save one person while killing five. If you do nothing, five people will die. What do you do?”
There is only one way to answer incorrectly. I won’t tell you how, but if you do, then there’s no point in continuing to discuss the hypothetical situation I previously described and we should stop then. Good luck. ;p
Nice dodge, Morgan. š Yeah, I don’t see much reason to continue either, unless you want to address my concerns directly.
Precisely! No reason to gum up a game with bad advancement systems and boring encounters. Let’s let the player have fun out of the box. If there’s content that players would rather skip over, then that content needs to be reviewed, adjusted, and/or removed from the game.
Slyfeind wrote:
*ahem* Thought experiment. *cough*
Addressing your concerns means adding more variables to the experiment. You are deliberately making the experiment more complex. In the experiment, there are no telephones, instant messengers, bulletin boards, e-mail, or snail mail. You only have the facts of the experiment with which to work. That’s why I shared that uncritical inference test with you.
Many people, including myself, when first given the Trolley Problem will want to rationalize the situation, creating ideal circumstances and solutions to avoid making a self-affecting decision. Since I’ve repeated the same philosophy courses several times—my philosophy professors hated me—I’ve heard plenty of ways out of the problem. “Put up a barricade. Drain the fuel. Remove the wheels. Collaborate with others to remove the people from both tracks simultaneously. Kill the one guy because everyone hates him! Nuke the city and destroy civilization. Why would five people be stuck on trolley tracks anyway?”
The truth is that you’re not confused. You’re just missing the point of the experiment. People act in ways that can be perplexing to others. A good example are people who play massively multiplayer online games alone, avoiding contact with other people whenever possible. We could be talking about this subject over pizza, but we’re using Raph’s blog. We could be calling each other up, but we’re not. We could be instant messaging, but we’re not. Bulletin boards, e-mail, and snail mail are also available to us, and yet, we’re not using them! That doesn’t mean we’re ignoring reality. We are reality. We are stranger than fiction.
Peter S.>I would answer that by saying, on principle, that inhibiting socialization is contradictory to the core point of having MMOs.
Trade is not socialisation, it’s trade. You can socialise just as much as you could before; what you can’t do is trade with random people. OK, so perhaps public auction houses can be allowed, if you want to help solo players (it won’t bring in that much more RMT).
Richard
Here’s my 2 cents:
1. Some folks have more time than money (ie – folks sporting bind-on-drop gear that takes 20 hours to acquire a single piece, AND Chinese gold farmers)(OMG did he just equate the two? Yup I did.)
2. Other folks have more money than time (anyone who buys in RMT)
3. Trading is fundamentally fun, as its just a kind of social interaction
4. Games can basically reward skill or dedication, and most MMORPGs today lean towards dedication (aka time)
So RMT just makes obvious the tradeoff between time and money. So this upsets the people who actually had the dedication/time originally, as it appears to dilute/debase their achievements. What can a deisgner do?
1. Design so that both the purchaser and the non-purchaser have a fun levelling progression. Let the paying guy advance through your content 2-3x as fast, but not 100x. Don’t abandon level limits or skill requirements to use dropped items. In this way the paying player is forced to play through some content (presumably they are also there for the fun of playing) and the non-paying player feels that they have still achieved something.
2. Design so that you can gain convenience and efficiency by paying, but not status. Some things need to be reserved for those who put in the time.
3. Design so that other players cannot get annoyed at whatever the paying guy is doing. In Korean F2P FPSs, typically the best selling item is a scope/targetting reticle enhancement. The guy who guy got shot doesn’t know if his enemy has skill or purchased assistance, but the purchaser does. This sort of asymetry helps both sides have fun.
4. Design multiple systems of success. Maybe having an active guild gains you a glowing halo around your head. Maybe exploring far and wide lets you learn unique emotes. Maybe being and active merchant gains you unique and temporary pets. Diversify away from the unilinear goal of “level 70 > level 69”. If we reward the players for it, they will do it.
I’m all for RMT, personally and professionally, and cannot wait for games to be better designed for the opportunities this presents.
I personally feel the genre has evolved just enough to have some standard rules that need to be followed. One of them is some sort of ingame currency. People get this. Replacing that with something completely new (like decaying cash or a barter-only system or the never-explained “we don’t use money anymore” Star Trek | Earth-only thing) would be a hard sell to your staff, much less the VC/management, and then the public š I’m sure it could be done, but it’d be an indie-level success that’d need to rise way above any other indie ever did for it to create a success big enough to be emulated. And it couldn’t be the only idea in that game to garner the sort of attention it’d need to attract players.
So you have ingame currency and people who want more of it. RMT as a result, with the ongoing (and recurring) talk of restricting how it moves between characters, and why:
Thank you for helping me realize I wasn’t the only one espousing the “keeping up with the Joneses” angle. š
But then you’re down the path of listing useless items with inflated prices to complete the RMT transaction. And you’ve got your data monitoring algorithms trying to find the patterns and collecting the batch of this-month’s permaban-ees. It’s really no different than what current happens except you’re proposing to moving the direct inter-character trade function to guilded-only members (which really would only extend the time of the transaction from “get 1,000 gold now” to “get 1,000 gold in a week”). And more restrictions does impede socializing in some ways, because the harder something is to do, the less likely it’ll happen (heh, epiphany). Gifting your friends who just joined the game with gear or gold is the same thing really, a way to help them out, brag about your achievements, show them their own futures, all rolled up into a single gesture.
RMT is not about buying fun nor getting around boredom. It’s about jumping a specific hurdle to continue why you were there in the first place. Raph’s started a new post about strategy guides, which I’ll be reading next (long holiday = lots to catch up on). But to me, RMTing in this regard is something similar to strategy guides. Most people do not follow a step-by-step guide to getting ahead in a game (unless they’re on their third alt). They use the guides to get over a particular hump, a raid boss, a quest location, etc.
I’d love to know how much a person is a repeat RMT-er, and why (if at all, and outside those games built on microtrans).
Richard:
Trade is a motivation and opportunity for social contact. Think of crafters building relationships with clients in these games.
A personal example, while I played WoW, one character was a Warlock who took Engineering as his trade skill. Now, with Engineering, one low-level item you can make is EZ-Throw Dynamite, essentially an Engineering explosive usable by non-Engineers. I made *tons* of the stuff, and tried to tip people in dynamite on *every* trade I made (even for stuff like summoned water). Believe me, socialization resulted muchly. š
(I’m an RPer. The character was a worshipper of the Church of Boom. Dynamite made the world a Better Place.)
[…] weeks ago I ran into Raph Koster’s website, mentioned on gamasutra.com. Raph was having a lively debate with someone named Tobold over the elimination of RMT (Real Money Transfers) from WoW, and how you […]