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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

How much for the women?

Goldseller X: “Your women. I want to buy your women. How much for the women? Sell them to me. How much for just the daughter?”

Julie: “What?!”

Goldseller X: “The little girl. How much for just the little girl…”

Julie: “What are you…”

Goldseller X: “Sorry. Force of habit. Buy my gold – cheap. 24 hour service.”

Julie: “Leave me alone.”

Goldseller X: “How about power leveling? Don’t you want to ascend?”

Julie: “I’ll ascend you into low geosynchronous orbit if you don’t leave me alone.”

Goldseller X:”Powerleveling – just 3 days to get to level 30″

Julie: “What’s the sense in that?”

Goldseller X: “What?”

Julie: “What’s the sense in that? Why buy the game if I am going to let you play it? Where’s the sense in that?”

Goldseller X: “Well so you can…”

Julie: “Never mind. It was a rhetorical question.”

Goldseller X:  “A what?”

Julie: “A rhetorical question, not meant to be answered. You know…like yours. Now go away.”

(short pause)

Goldseller X: “Do you want to buy gold? Cheap. 24 hour service.”

Julie: “You just asked me that. I said no.”

Goldseller X: “I thought you might have changed your mind in the last five minutes.”

Julie: “So what’s your half life?”

Goldseller X: “My what?”

Julie: “You’re half life. You know – like radioactive waste.  You guys operate on the same principle don’t you? Once you exist you are nearly impossible to get rid of.”

Goldseller X: “I never thought of it that way.”

Julie: “I read an article once that said cockroaches would be the last thing existing on earth after everyone and everything else dies.

Goldseller X: “I think I know where this is going…”

Julie: “If the cockroaches inherit the earth I think you guys will inherit the earth from the cockroaches.”

Goldseller X: “Look. We supply a service. I wouldn’t exist if no one ever used the services.”

Julie: “Contract killers provide a service too, that doesn’t mean I want one in my bedroom.”

Goldseller X: “I’m not in your bedroom.”

Julie:”Yes you are. I’m on a computer terminal in my bedroom.”

Goldseller X: “That doesn’t mean I’m there.”

Julie:”You’ve got a point. Come to think of it, it’s worse than that. You’re in my mind. It’s like a voice I can’t get rid of. It’s like I’m hearing voices. It’s like…like…”

Goldseller X: “Like a bad disease for which there is no cure.”

Julie: “That’s right.”

Goldseller X: “So?”

Julie: “So what? What do you mean so?”

Goldseller X: “Do you want to buy my gold?”

Julie: “I thought we already established this. The answer is no.  Don’t you guys have something you can make a living at that is less annoying?”

Goldseller X: “Like what?”

Julie: “I don’t know…like a slaver, a contract killer, a drug pusher. Just about anything else, just so long as it isn’t here. Just let me play Aion in peace.”

(another pause)

Goldseller X: “NOW would you like to buy my…”

Julie: “So you insist that you are just providing a service right?”

Goldseller X: “And…”

Julie: “How about I pay you to go away for just the next hour that I am here?”

Goldseller X:”To leave all the men and women here alone for just an hour?’

Julie: “Yes. That’s it exactly. How much?”

Goldseller X: “You couldn’t afford it.”

Julie: “How much?”

Goldseller X: “Really. You couldn’t afford to have me leave all the men and women here alone for an hour.”

Julie: “O.K. Then how much for the women?”

Me thinks thou doest protest too much...

When Scott Hartsman was on the No Prisoners, No Mercy (NPNM) show (and shame on you if you have to Google the name to find out who he is) one of the aspects of gaming that we discussed was gold selling.  Having experienced the opening day jitters of Aion Online all I can say is this: I’m glad China outlawed gold selling – it has had such a tremendous effect on gaming.

I am sure there are myriad reasons the Government of China had for banning the sale of virtual goods for real money, but it is a law that will be incredibly difficult to enforce in the first place.  And to throw yet another wrench into the works, China is far from being the only country that has gold sellers.

Now I am sure those who where there on opening day, right along with me, will point to the long ques to get on to the popular servers.  In fact, at one point I heard a voice from the other side of the room cry “TWO THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY!”

But it is not the ques that filled me with angst. Oh no. As we have spoken about before, my friends, any time a company releases a new game, the number of servers available at start is just a crap shoot. Add to that the number of people who purchase the game just for the thirty free days that is pro-forma in the industry and you have one perplexing problem.

But it is not the number of servers that has me perplexed.

Nope.

As Mr. Hartsman pointed out to us on the NPNM show, time and again his forums were filled with players who were not just aggravated with gold sellers, but despised them.   Yet for all that, gold selling continued to be a problem in Everquest.  Such is the way it is with all games.  As gamers we  have all come to expect that. Still, it must certainly be a case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing – for while one hand is typing out a message of protest on a video-game forum the other is reaching for a credit card to buy gold.

While some players have been busy complaining about waiting ques (and long ques are not always a bad thing as we discussed earlier) others where finding that there accounts have already been banned…or so it seems.   Over at a game site I happened upon this morning called Gamer Limit there is an interesting article by one Colin Robinson, entitled “joking about selling gold earns a ban“.  Here is an excerpt from the article by a perplexed player who emailed Gamer Limit after finding himself banned “allegedly” (as they say in legal circles) for “joking about selling gold”:

“I managed to log on one of the low population servers as soon as they brought it online, played for about 45 minutes, then when I hit level 5 (the level you need to use the regional chat), I joined in a conversation about the future of the game. I made a somewhat antagonizing remark to someone who said they would be buying kinah as soon as it became available, as if I was a gold farmer. I typed “YOU WANT BUY MIRRION GOLD? 1 MIRRION GOLD FIVE US DORRA” or something stupid along those lines, and got some ‘lols’ from people who clearly knew I was kidding. We talked about how full the chinese servers were of bots, and how chat was flooded 24/7 by gold sellers on asian servers. I said it would probably be a day or two before they started spamming chat and botting in US release, and then two minutes later I was booted from the game, and greeted by that message when I tried to join again. ” – “Redmoons” quoted on Gamer Limit

While the author of the article feels that this means NCSoft is getting off to a “questionable start” it appears that it hadn’t occured to either the author or player in question that the ban just might be for being a cross burning racist. 

 It seems, however, that all the gold sellers and leveling services pre-ordered the game and jumped right on to the early start. I hadn’t been online more than a minute than I was barraged with whispers from players with names like “fgytxz” offering their services – the most perplexing of all where the leveling services…

“Let me understand this,” I thought to myself, “I just paid Fifty plus dollars to purchase a game so I can relax and enjoy myself, and this person is offering to power level my character to the level cap in three days?” 

Sure, and while I am at it I can just give the anonymous player with a name that looks like a really difficult jumble (an all too common sight) a call once a month to let me know how my character is progressing. In fact, why even play the game at all?  Of course there is the slight chance that availing myself of said anonymous player’s services would soon result in my social security number and bank account number being plastered all over the Internet.

I have never seen the sense of it. 

Yet, as all things in an open market, there wouldn’t be a supply if there was no demand.  So while some players will be busy complaining about long waiting lines, and others about being banned for “joking about gold selling.” I for one would like to take a moment and applaud NCSoft – no, to cheer them from the rooftops for being tough on gold sellers and buyers.  It is a valiant fight and always a difficult one.  After all, when considered as a whole,  as gamers we rarely seem to have the phrase “live and learn” as part of our vocabularies.

So as I busy myself about the business of cheering NCSoft for their business acumen let me paraphrase yet another line from the immortal bard which began this article.

I come to bury gold sellers, not to praise them.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather