Coming to a game near you!
What do Medieval Europe and Aion Online have in common?
They are both beset by a plague spread by rats – only in the case of Aion Online the rats are called Gold Sellers. As we discussed earlier in our virtual pub (“Methinks thou dost protest too much”) gaming forums are full to the brim with players complaining about gold sellers. Bring up the subject at any gathering of gamers and you will soon have a room full of gamers screaming about the evils of RMT (Real Money Trading). And as we all know they wouldn’t exist if no one ever used their services.
You can't keep a gold seller down.
I started the article by comparing gold sellers to plague rats. Perhaps they might be more appropriately compared to zombies. After all, they are just as hard to kill. Like water seeking its own level, gold sellers try and find every possible path to players. NCSoft has tried denying players the ability to use general chat before level 5; and now they have extended that denial to whispers. All that happened was that gold sellers are forced to level up a bit before they hawk their wares. Fortunately there is a setting in Aion to take yourself off the listing of players in any given area (just type “/anon”), but that only cuts down on the offers to sell gold. Try to hide from the gold sellers by setting your status to “anonymous” and the gold sellers use the trade channel to sell gold.
None of this is new territory of course. Even the 800 pound Activision/Blizzard Gorilla hasn’t been able to stop gold selling. Activision/Blizzard regularly bans more accounts for buying and selling gold than some games have subscribers, yet still they come back …undead…unstoppable…and unbelievably persistent. Even when the creators of World of Warcraft (WoW) stop all other avenues of access the gold sellers resort to spelling out the name of their website using dead player corpses in the middle of WoW’s virtual cities.
No matter how big of a shotgun NCSoft uses, there is little doubt that they will ever be able to kill the gold selling zombies. Activision/Blizzard has been trying for years and all they have managed to do is decrease the level (and believe me even that is greatly appreciated). Sony Online Entertainment (at least in some cases) seems to be taking more of a “if you can’t beat them, join them – then dominate the market” approach.
As any good Doctor knows, it is far better to treat the cause, rather than the symptoms.
At face value, the cause of RMT might seem to be the people selling the gold in the first place. The true cause however is the reason the gold sellers exist at all. That reason, of course, is the very structure of the games we play (and here I differentiate between a game world and a virtual environment like second life). What might seem to be the place to begin the virtual surgery, to cut out the cause of gold selling,would be the reason for the need.
Right?
Players in Aion Online, for example, will find that one of the many money sinks is the hideously expensive cost of crafting. You can’t simply mine iron and turn it into steel…instead there is a character selling the required “extra ingredient” – someone who is more loan shark than NPC. Every game has money sinks. If it isn’t crafting it will be the hideously expensive mounts that are sought after in WoW. What needs to be called in to question, however, is what keeps players coming back for more in the first place. Why as gamers to we continue to pay a subscription to play a game? Why is it that developers feel the need to appeal to greed to string players along and keep that income stream coming? Is it impossible for gamers to play a game simply to enjoy playing?
We should, of course, look to what is traditionally called the “end game”. Unless you have some massive budget you can’t keep tacking on more levels or more content (the latter being Turbine’s once promised solution in the case of Lord of the Rings Online). No matter how fast you produce content, players will always outstrip your ability to produce it. You can try having a player vs. Player centered end game, and set artificial goals for players to accomplish to keep them interested. A recent effort along those lines, Warhammer Online, is no longer the “fair haired child” they once were. You can make quests repeatable, but even that gets old (Witness the case of the many “dailies” in WoW).
In the end, however a developer tries to stop gold selling (or beat them to the punch in some cases) I think one of the most likely outcomes is expressed by Dr. Richard Bartle in a comment to his recent article over at Terra Nova. The article is called “Taking a Gamble” and is available here:
“There will always be players who consider RMT a bad thing, and who will seek to find virtual worlds where it is proscribed. For these players, a subscription-based MMO has a competitive advantage. In the great scheme of these, these people will be outnumbered by the majority, who don’t actually want to play games (or aren’t able to) the whole time. In absolute terms, though, it will still involve a substantial number of people.” – Richard Bartle, in a comment to “Taking a Gamble”
See you online,
Julie Whitefeather
The Gold spam finally did me in this week in Aion. Having reached that point in the game where grouping is a requirement, I can’t even join the LFG group without having to deal with 25 continuout gold spamming bots and not able to utilize the game function due to exploting.
NCSoft will probably do what they always do, and that’s not very much, when it comes to bots and spammers. Lineage II was plagued by this and still is, to this day.
I put in my cancelation today. Maybe in a couple of months, I will look back in and take my two 20′s a little further.
In fact I have been considering doing the same thing…for similar reasons. The gold selling has reached pandemic proportions – it is no longer a small irritant. They have spread through every channel and every facet of the game without the slightest effort to check their progress.
And sad to say, you are quite correct.
In the end it seems to me that NCSoft can have a game where grouping is mandatory or the can have a game with rampant gold selling. What they can’t have is both. This is a crucial month for this game – even more so because this is a company with three strikes against it on our shores and they can ill afford another.