Stats on RMT Actions

When, in another thread, I learned about SOE and the station-exchange (EQ2 being, or will be part of it) I began researching it myself because questions I asked were never answered.

For instance, I wanted to know if this legit service put a full halt to spamming in game, or a full halt to all 3rd party sales. I was also curious to know if theft, duping, or fraud accounts were still being used.

I came across this article a few weeks ago:
SOE's president John Smedley.

While John seems very optimistic about how the Exchange has been working, there are some very interesting points he states..


The conclusion that I can come to and to use the best example I think I can find; The battle between game publishers of onlines games and that of RMT services is much like the battle of Virus Protection and Virus programmers.

Virus Protection will make a patch, but not so far down the road the Virus Programmers evolve it and find a new way to get past the patch.

It would appear that while SOE felt they could stamp out the 3rd party dealings by partnering up and making their own RMT, 3rd party RMT just evolved to find a new way to make money off of players and the game.

It will be interesting to see how SOE tackles this new problem with the Exchange.

Anyways, it's a good article to read in full. It shows the road SOE hopes it can take and its ideas for creating such a system, but it also sheds light on what new problems arise in such systems.

I wonder if the reduction in RMT will have an effect on the game economy? Seems that with fewer rich players prices for stuff could come down.

This is most interesting indeed, but I'm not surprised one inch by what he says. This was to be expected, because it's happened in security where hackers became professional for the sake of money. In essence, as you higlight later, the problems are similar:

Side note: it's even worse, a lot of hackers are now waiting for patches to reverse-engineer the virus.

The problem is the same in the sense that they (hackers, RMT) try to use the resources (programme, game) of other companies (OS/application, MMO) to earn money. Atm hackers are doing much more damage, but I guess that given how little scrupulous these people are, they're bound to end up collaborating (I remember Gaile mentioned lots of account hacking happening via 3rd party RMT apps).

The worse in all this is that, like in security, people (well, the honest ones because I guess a few will claim that it's legit for them, egocentrism FTL) will only react when their account got stolen or when MMO companies will start to charge more money for the anti-RMT services they have to buy (like EQII) or implement.

Yes funny means funny haha. Yes Blizzard is doing the oppposite of what Anet is doing in fighting the RMT's and Blizzard is winning.

Yes RMT's are a plague. There really isnt any other way to say it.

It is true. But it's not much as doing the exact opposite. Different more like. And as you can see Blizzard is doing a better job at it.

Let me clarify.-

Both Blizzard and Anet are trying to fight RMT. In doing so, Anet put up some announcement about how bad RMT is and have Gaile here coming to some random fansite forum throwing some random number at us (without any hard evidence I might add. But we're supposed to trust her because she's working for Anet, right?). Pretty much everything in GW is the same. Loot scaling (which is there to fight gold seller) is still there. Anti-farming nerfs is still there. Nothing's changed.

Blizzard also put up some announcement about how bad RMT is. They also make sure that players see no need in buying gold by putting tons of new daily quests into the game, most of them with big rewards (and of course the quests are tied-in with heavy storylines and lores and new contents). You can also now do 25 daily quests per day (raised from the limited of 10). Roughly, a level 70 player can make 400g+ out of these 25 daily quests. Gold is easy to obtain for pretty much everyone (with a level70 character), not just the farmers. In-game economy, however, is still intact as though nothing has changed; item prices are still the same. No inflation occurs (largely because the game has a very effective optional money-sink mechanic where gold actually leaves the system instead of just switching hands like it is in GW). All in all nobody is crying about the change, not even one bit.

See the differences now? Why can't Anet do what others do?