Tag: RMT

Subscription versus RMT

Gaming

Search around the gaming blogs and you’ll probably find out the opinions of everyone weighing in on SOE putting RMT in the form of their new Station Cash into EQ and EQII.  There have also been announcements that the new Star Wars MMO from Bioware might be a free-to-play/RMT model game.  And SOE does have FreeRealms and The Agency coming.

To be honest… I really don’t care overly much.  About the only problem I have with the whole thing is that I find it weird when a game offers both on the same server.  EQ and EQII both still have a monthly fee that you have to pay to play the game, and now on top of that there is the Station Cash which allows you to buy weapons and armor (nothing great, but definitely a leg up from starting with nothing if you are willing to pay the $10 for it rather than get gear as you play), and experience point bonus potions (where you get use it and for the next 4 or 2 hours you get a 10%, 25% or 50% bonus to your exp earning, again nothing great, but would help you out if you’d rather spend the cash than the time it would take to grind out that exp on your own).  It will be interesting to see where they take it, how much of what kind of items they end up putting on the market, and how much profit they derive from it.  And of course, if they release an expansion that increases the level cap, now that they sell exp bonus potions for cash, will they be inclined to increase the experience curve in new levels making people desire the potions more?  If that is the route they end up going, that’s where I find the problem of using both payments in one game.  So now I am paying my $15 a month to get a game designed to make me want to pay more money…  seems underhanded, if that is the direction this goes.  But for now, its all a “wait and see”.

Another reason I don’t care about which payment model they follow is that neither subscriptions nor microtransactions address the problems that I have with most MMOs.  Let’s take Warhammer Online for example.  I really wanted to play this game, and on some level I still do.  I haven’t played it since beta because my contract job ended and I am out of work.  Its hard to justify paying for a game box and then a monthly fee when I need to be saving every penny until I find work again.  (I am just about the unluckiest person when it comes to unemployment… contract ends right as the economy goes to shit… the last time I was unemployed was in 2001… you remember 2001, right?  That was when the tech field kinda collapsed a bit and then terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center… so, I’m unemployed, sell your stocks and don’t visit any targets of opportunity.)  If I were to play Warhammer Online, sadly, I could only play with half of the people I want to play with.  A bunch of gaming bloggers and readers made up a group called the Casualties of War and picked one server.  I tried to steer my old EQ friends on to the same server, but they ended up somewhere else.  Unfortunately, these two servers were not merged.  So, if I did buy the game, I’d have to pick one group of friends over the other.  This has pretty much been true of every MMO to come out since EQ.  Even with EQ, while I started out on E’Ci with my local friends when I started a new job and found out a couple of people there played EQ too, they were on another server.  Sure, we could still share stories about the game and talk about stuff, but we could never play together… and even more odd, the two servers in question had totally different communities: for example, on E’Ci, player item auctioning was done in the East Commonlands tunnel; on the other server, Greater Faydark.  One server was fairly decent about setting up a raid calendar and people trying not to close people out of content, the other was totally free-for-all.  And while it was interesting to be able to talk about and compare how two groups of people played the same game completely differently, it was overshadowed by not being able to play together without paying fees, leaving behind friends, or playing on two servers (which given the “effort” required to level and raid in EQ, playing on two servers was kind of insane unless you were only serious about one of them).

These days, when a new MMO is launching, I don’t even bother to ask if its a subscription game or a micro transaction game… the first question I always ask is “How many servers do they have?”

R M T

Gaming

At the end of the year, the blogs were alive with the sound of Real Money Transactions. Not that the blogs were charging money, but lots of the game developer blogs were talking about the subject. I’m not going to provide links because it was pretty much all of them to some degree, though Raph and Tobold has the biggest intertwining discussion.

My take on RMT… I don’t like it because of the way it changes player behavior. For an example of what I’m talking about, I’m actually going to step away from games, because the behavior I dislike is not specific to games.

Tickle Me Elmo.

The year that toy came out it carried a manufacturer suggested retail price of $28.99. However, the willingness of people to pay (reportedly) as much as $1500 just to have one of the limited production item in time for Christmas changed the market place. Without the lure of profit, the lines down at the toy store would have been kids and moms and dads, maybe some grandparents. Instead, stores also had to contend with people looking for a quick buck instead of a toy. That year, my roommate was working at Toys R Us. He pulled a few of the Elmos off the truck for himself, bought them, and then sold them for $600 each. All in all he got about a $3400 profit on a $130 initial investment. I would have complained, but it meant he’d start paying his share of the rent and bills.

Now, I realize and understand a parent’s desire to get the “it” toy for their kids. But having an inside man at Toys R Us that year, I later learned that after the holiday season, they had plenty of the Elmos at the regular $28.99, and if your child is going to throw a huge tantrum and hate you forever because they didn’t get a specific toy under the tree, the problem may not be the toy. Maybe.

RMT brings out some of the same behavior from players in video games. A player who would never sit in one area farming gold or potion reagents might do exactly that once they learn they can earn a nice supplementary income from it. I’ve even been tempted by it myself. During periods when my wife has been between jobs, I’ve tried to convince her to spend her days farming money or power leveling characters so that we could sell them. Ultimately, we never did that because I always came to realize I was succumbing to the “Everyone else is doing it, why can’t we?” attitude. I didn’t want to farm gold, but my own game had been affected by gold farmers from time to time that I wanted a piece of the action.

It is, in a way, just like the Elmo toys. Sure, a player could wait, he doesn’t need 100 gold right now, he could adventure around and the money will come, the game is designed that way. But if he’s willing to buy that gold from someone willing to eschew adventuring for farming, RMT is going to exist.

So, if you wanted to, how could you get rid of RMT? Many people have suggested things like limiting trades and making items unable to be traded… but really, even then you can’t entirely stop the RMT. If everything in the game was not dropable and you couldn’t trade anything at all, full account sales would increase. The farmer wouldn’t farm gold or items, he’d just level and outfit characters and sell the whole kit and caboodle. Really, though, seriously, if you wanted to absolutely remove RMT from your game there are only two ways to do it.

  1. Make it a single player game.
  2. Make everything (levels, money, items) available to every player for no effort.

Option 1 defeats the purpose of an MMO, and also doesn’t completely end RMT since someone out there somewhere will be trying to sell his strategy guide and/or walk through. Option 2 puts you on the field with First Person Shooters – there is nothing to gain from play, so the game play itself must be the draw.

The Hidden Effects of RMT

Gaming

It started (this time) with Lum, and then spread to Psychochild and from there to Grouchy Gnome, Moorgard, Cael, and Nick over at My 2 Copper: Real Money Transactions.

For now, let’s leave out discussions of my feelings on RMT’s effects on games, let’s leave out discussions of game design, let’s leave out the possible reasons people do it (lack of time, boredom, etc.). Instead, I’m going to talk about the hidden effects of RMT, specifically one that no one talks about.

I have two friends, well, I have more than two friends, jeez, I’m not a recluse, but for this discussion it only pertains to two of my friends. One of them is like me, we play the games for the games themselves, if something takes twenty hours it takes twenty hours. The other one buys gold. Basically, the second friend is usually a late adopter of games, or he’s distracted by other new games and “falls behind”, so he buys gold to catch up. He also does so once he reaches the “end game” because he doesn’t like farming. To sum up, one of my friends RMTs call him Brad, and the other doesn’t call him Mike.

The three of us are sitting in a bar talking over a table of beers. Mike and I are laughing and telling stories. Quests that went wrong, encounters that went down the shitter, PvP where we were handed our asses, funny monster pathing stories, and basically everything under the sun that comes from playing the game the boring traditional way, most of it involving failures of spectacular effort on our part. “This one time, I was out pulling in Mistmoore and I didn’t realize I’d agro’d a second mob from up top. So the group is fighting along some extra pulls from the front when the entire freakin’ Castle comes charging out! Holy Christ! There were like three hundred mobs and it was total chaos, so I grab agro on most of them and start running in a big damn circle…” Hilarity ensues. Brad nods, listens and laughs. He even has a story or two of his own, but Mike and I completely dominate the story telling and largely because most of our stories come from all the game that Brad skipped because with his bought gold he didn’t need to play it, or the uber items he scored with his bought gold made the encounters so easy the only story he could tell is how he sliced through everything like a hot knife through warm butter and he almost died when that mob ten levels higher than him showed up and he almost ran out of hitpoints on the three minute run for the zone line.

Now, of course this isn’t true in all cases. Once we finally all get up to raid level in games, the field levels a bit, because you usually can’t RMT past “end game” content unless you are buying characters, which Brad doesn’t do.

Why do I care? Brad comes to me one day and says, “Man, you guys always have great stories to tell. I wish I had those.”

There you have it… RMT ruins the time you spend with your friends drinking beers and talking about the game. And really, you have a job to get ahead in life, aren’t our games and hobbies intended to be done for the memories? Of course, that can go both ways… if I RMT’d too, Brad and I might be talking about all the high level content we were killing while Mike sat there with his little stories of low level quests, loser. So, in the end, my conclusion is… RMT or not, it doesn’t really matter, but make sure that you and your friends are all on similar pages so that no one gets left out.