How would a good RMT game work?
Because the hornets aren't quite stirred up enough…
Post your ideas and hypotheticals on how RMT could work here. Let's not focus on why or why not RMT is a bad thing (there's another post for that), but how you could make RMT work. Feel free to poke holes in each others' ideas, but be nice.
June 30th, 2006 at 10:21 am
What do you mean by RMT game? A game with RMT as a strong central element such as Second Life or a game that simply supports RMT? If it only has to support RMT do you mean it supports it across all servers or can you have servers (or perhaps sections of game play) that do not feature RMT?
June 30th, 2006 at 10:41 am
Surprise me.
June 30th, 2006 at 11:31 am
Well, just to get the ball rolling, I would not assume that everyone would want to play on the RMT playing field, so I would advocate a separation between servers with RMT approved servers and RMT illegal servers. I use the word ‘illegal’ instead of ‘unapproved’ because not only is it not being condoned by the game company but it is a bannable offense to participate in RMT in any way, buying or selling.
I made a similar comment on another post here and then went and fleshed it out with a bit more detail on my own blog here, leaving out some non-essential stuff from my comment here and touching on why current MMO economy models are doomed to inflation.
So I guess that would be a game where RMT is supported but not central.
June 30th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Blast. I tried to link over to my earlier comment without leaving a pingback on the article to another article on your site but I mucked it up. Since I can’t edit it could you correct it for me and delete this comment please?
June 30th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Ok, I’ll bite:
A good RMT game would have to be a full RMT game. What I mean by full is that all game assets should be available for cash. When you create an account, you have the option of creating a real cash account as well. When you play the game, cash can come in and go out of that account as you make transactions.
There would be in-game money as well, let’s call this gold. So the material possessions of your character are the virtual assets (inventory), gold and cash attributed to the account. Now let’s put this into practice.
All game items and gold itself can be purchased by cash. They can also, in turn, be sold for cash. The game would utilize a market system whereby the cash value assigned to game assets is determined by the machinations of the free market. The free market sets values based on basic economic principles of supply and demand.
Since everyone can participate in the market, price is constantly regulated. An asset that is oversold would see diminishing attractiveness to supply it. Rare items would always see higher prices but even these would be affected by pricing pressures. Is it worth the time to get the rare item if you can sell less rare items more often?
Now let’s introduce farmers into this situation. The major complaint about farmers is that they ruin the game by camping or grinding or generally not “playing” the game. If you utilize a free market system, you take away their free lunch. If they find a profitable thing to do, guess what? The rest of the market will do it as well, deflating the price. At the end of the day, they no longer have an advantage given by the closed black market system. They won’t go away (its naive to think they ever will) but they will now end up acting less out on the fringe. The icky feeling of them “gaming” the system will go away.
Why would this be appealing to the regular player? It won’t be for everyone and it will depend on the game. However, creating a market system and assigning value to game assets can make it much more tangible and eventually profitable. If you look at Second Life and Linden dollars, you see that people are encouraged to be productive.
You may think that the game would fall into chaos as everyone plays it to make money. However, again, the market evens things out. If you have a game heavy on sellers, prices drop and sellers will eventually leave. If a game is heavy on buyers, sellers would enter the market, creating equilibrium. There will be three groups, those that sell, those that buy, and those that don’t participate in the market. (There’s a fourth group that doesn’t even want to get close to RMT but they won’t be in the game).
For this last group, their experiences will be negatively affected only if they value their time much more than everyone else. Then you have the scenario where they say, “I spent this much time getting this but this guy got it for only $$$”. If they don’t become buyers at that point, they’ll eventually leave. I’m not sure this will be significant enough to cripple the system.
For players that value their time equal to or less than the other two groups, then they will feel that it is fair or that they’ve beaten the system. For the former, “I guess that’s about right for what I did to get that asset” and for the latter, “Wow, I can’t believe the suckers paying for that” (They might become sellers).
It is a significant shift in the way to think about games. We are ignoring the elephant in the room in current MMORPGs if we continue to believe that there should not be any monetary value placed on virtual assets. So long as people assign value to things, these same things will have monetary value and trades will happen. The only way to prevent unfairness or exploitation is to open it up.
I don’t think I answered your question creating a good RMT game; I’m not, afterall, a designer. Oh well, I love burning up pixels.
July 1st, 2006 at 2:01 am
Depending on how you define an “RMT game”, we have a good example: Puzzle Pirates.
Briefly, there’s two types of servers: subscription and “doubloon”. You can play the subscription “oceans” for a subscription, or play the “doubloon” oceans for free. The trick is that you have to buy doubloons with real money, and pay those doubloons in the game to do certain things, such as tradeskills. So, you can play the basic game for free, but have to pay to go beyond the basics. You can also redeem doubloons for in-game currency (pieces o’ eight), but not the other way around.
This is a win on both sides. On the developer’s side, people can spend more money per month than they might pay in a subscription. Daniel James, aka Cap’n Cleaver and the big cheese on Puzzle Pirates, has said that some people have spent over $1000 on doubloons. Legitimately. It would take over 8 years of subscriptions at $10/month to earn that much money. Alternatively, there are some people that are in the game that don’t spend a dime, but still contribute to the social fabric of the game.
On the player side, it gives much more control to the player. Going on a month-long sabbatical? Don’t worry about canceling your account or forking over money for something you won’t use, because you won’t spend doubloons while gone. But, if you a boost to your in-game money you can just spend cash and get it directly from the developer. But, having a lot of pieces o’ eight doesn’t make you a good puzzle solver in the game.
This is the best way to do it. It allows the developer to have a measure of control over how the game works and how they allow RMT in the game. It’s additional revenue for the developer, and the nature of the game allowed this to fit in the game easily. On the other hand, it provides the players with more control than they might get normally.
I think this business model is the future for online games. I’ve been wanting to do something similar for years, but it wouldn’t work very well with Meridian 59 as it current exists.
Hope that fuels some thoughts.
July 1st, 2006 at 8:57 am
I think Puzzle Pirates works well because of it’s gameplay. The gameplay in the more traditional MMOs is more along the lines of killing hordes of nameless mobs. Where the usual, common encounters with mobs requires little to no thought. Puzzle Pirates does balance RMTs and gameplay well, but I do find that there is a large gap between players that RMT and those that don’t. Not quite a bad thing, but the gap does exist. The ones who pay do have more stuff, but because of the game design advancing in the game means becoming more socially connected. Owning a shop, selling items to other players. Owning a ship, having other players sail with you.
Some may find it unfair that it’s really hard to experience certain aspects of the game without paying, but I think it’s fair. For this payment model of a MMO, I think it could work well in a more tradition setting with some changes to game design. Advancing to become more connected, constant interaction between all level of players, at the beginning a player can access almost everything, etc.
July 5th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Math is hard. This is the second iteration of this post. I sure hope 9 and 8 adds up to 17.
The farmers need to be kept out while RMT is enabled. For this there should be no mechanism built to allow players to “cash out”. Facilitating the ability to turn in game items and currency into real world money only incourages farming and game destruction.
I this it was Pyschochild who mentioned in the other thread that items purchased through RMT should not be the same items earned in game. They shouldn’t be worse, and certainly not better, just not the exact same items. If the only way to truly distinguish the 2 is through making one of them less effective it needs to be the RMT one, but it needs to be as low impact as possible.
Pricing is the key part. It needs to be clear up front that all pricing is subject to change along with current market values. For RMT of in game currency you’ll need to check ebay and other outlets for the average going rate, and under cut it just a little. This is to help deter the farmers, If the price is too high you’ll invite farmers, but if it’s too low the inflation will spiral out of control.
The price of items needs to be an auction system, because the items available for RMT will be limited. Items only become available to RMT when a comparable item is earned in game. This is to keep a balanced proportion between those who are spending time to advance and those who are spending money to do the same.