Amber Night

By way of Tera Nova, Playnoevil.com reports:

My friend over at A Clockwork Mind got busted for RMT in Eve Online by CCP. Instead of banning him, the company put him deeply in debt forcing him to work for months or buy currency cards from the company to get way out of trouble.

Huh.

Punishing instead of outright banning isn't a new idea, but I haven't heard of any other major players doing it yet.  CCP could be on to something…or not.  It's an interesting policy because the player gets spanked, with the added benefit (for the company) that they might just go back to playing (and paying for) the game nicely.

At first glance, I no like.  Amber's First Law of MMORPGs states that The Real World Stream and The Virtual World Stream shall not cross.  This is probably someone more important's law, like Koster's Law or Bartle's Law, but they didn't manage to get it into a Google cache, so it's my law now bitches.

But the real question is whether CCP's possibly new policy of fining in-game for an out-of-game offense is an effective way of dealing with RMTers, whether they play EVE or WoW or (wait for it) Hello Kitty Island Adventures.

My heart tells me to ban the fuckers automatically because I don't want them in the game I play.  Whereas my brain…well my brain is also a vindictive bitch, so it also says to ban the fuckers.  But even my very under-utilized logic center doesn't see a lot of motivation for the RMTer to use this opportunity to reform themselves.  If you're prone to cheating anyway, then why not just keep trying to buy your way out of debt until you're either banned or you succeed?  If you're further behind your goal of getting a leg up on other players anyway, what do you have to lose?  And through the process of figuring out a way of not getting caught, you're probably collecting some handy data points to figure out how to further game the system.  With the "ban 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure" method, it's much harder to collect this type of information.

The only real deterrent I see is the one where instead of paying $65 for 100 gold or whatever, now you'll need to pay $150 to get yourself out of the hole plus 100g.  If you're making so goddamn much money that you don't mind paying for electrons, then I don't think you're going to mind paying a little more. 

Survey says…meh.  I don't really think it's going to work, and I doubt we'll see the practice adopted by the rest of the industry.  Punishment works if the offender is truly interested in reforming.  My experience is that cheaters don't really do the whole contrition thing.

And for those of you wondering how Hello Kitty Island Adventures is addressing the problem…well, I don't know.  But I do know how to keep feeding the Google.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 6:25 am and is filed under MMOs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.