So, there’s an interesting side note to the post I made a while back on cheating, and the discussion surrounding RMT. A whole lot of people seem to think that the sort of info in Internet strategy guides isn’t cheating.

As someone who has been gaming for thirty years, I want to pat these people condescendingly on the head, and tell them to stop trying to make themselves feel better. But they happen to be highly influential bloggers, so I had better refrain from sarcasm (man, am I turning tetchy in my old age or what?). 😉

Here’s how Ten Ton Hammer puts it:

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In the latest exchange, we see Tobold proposing a thought experiment on RMT. Catch up on the previous steps in the debate here:

1. Tobold’s original proposal
2. My response
3. His disagreement
4. My more detailed response

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.

1. Remove all stats from all equipment.
2. 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:

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I made Tobold mad… not something nice to do right before Christmas, I suppose.

It started when he made this proposal for the eradication of RMT (bolding is mine, to emphasize the key point):

I think that RMT is possible to eradicate. You just need to make gold “bind on pickup”. That is, you need to remove all possibility of asymmetric trades where one player can give or send gold to another player. And you need to change the auction house system to make it anonymous and blind, so that players can’t buy a worthless rock for 1000 gold and transfer money that way. This is totally possible, but it would have a cost: it would also remove twinking (unless you program a shared bank) and sending money to friends or guild mates. But possible it is, the only thing that is missing is the will of the game companies.

Now, I was really prompted to comment by an anonymous poster in the resulting thread (on whom I unleashed some sarcasm), but my response specifically to this design was to say

Technically, you would have to make every item in the entire world bind on pickup. Eradicate all forms of trade. Remove healing. Remove grouping. Remove all forms of assistance between one player and another.

Tobold disagrees, and perhaps feels that the sarcasm was directed at him (it wasn’t, and if he thinks so, I apologize).

In a typical example of how little developers are open to new ideas, Raph tries to discredit me by saying that my proposal to remove asymetric trade is equivalent to removing groups and guilds and all forms of cooperation from MMORPGs. Apparently he didn’t understand or chose to ignore the important word “asymetric”. A group in which one person tanks, another person heals, and other people deal damage is *not* asymetric as long as the characters involved are of roughtly the same level.

OK, to tackle key points one at a time…

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