Issue 40 - Ain't Goin' Away Ever

[The Escapist Staff]

Shannon DrakeThe economics of virtual worlds have been changing drastically over the past few years. Shannon Drake talks to Kerry Fraser-Robinson, President and Managing Director of RedBedlam, on virtual economics and their upcoming title Roma Victor.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Rivan

Well, the sad thing is Kerry's perfectly right...

Me, for one, will never play any game where one's RL financial situation has an influence on his in-game wealth. Hey, I'm "playing" that kind of "game" every day already, and if I log onto a virtual online world, it's not to find the exact same crap than this side of the monitor.

That's only me. Others (especially wealthy others) may feel differently. No problem for me, as long as the spoiled brats stay in Project Entropia or Roma Victor and are somehow efficiently kept out of "my" worlds.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Longarms
http://TheHungerSite.com
Bloody Brilliant. You want more money? We'll sell it to you!

For $30, here's enough WoW Gold to your having to farm for it for 30 hours In Game Time. Unless you've got a deseire to grind/farm like that, a good number of people will pay the $30 and get on with what they see as actually PLAYING the bloody game.

Is it fair? Is it fair that people who have 24/7 playing time get further in game than those with jobs, spouses, and kids? Of course it's not fair. Legislating fairness sounds a bit like the communist manifesto. Each according to their need. Each according to their ability.

Each according to their ability to pay! If you don't want to buy your currency, don't! Just how viable that is, remains to be seen. However, the elimination of the farmers, the snitches, and the gold police sounds more to be a feature than an oversight.

Instead of pretending these things don't go on, including it in the game design is a real step toward a more stable in game economy.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Tom

Pure [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/04/25].

Like others mentioned, if I have more money than time, sounds fine.
But if I have more time than money, why would I play the game? You can be poor in-game, and do menial tasks for very little reward! How are you going to keep the lower ranks populated? A topheavy economic pyramid probably won't be as fun for the rich players either.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Marcus

I agree with longarms, why try and hide the fact people are doing this, better to confront it and turn it into a positive.

At the end of the day the world's that Rivan frequents are likely overrun with gold farmers etc anyway and a reasonable % (wouldn't like to guess) of players in those world's are using their services. So much better to have these "rich" players out in the open where their extravagance filters down through the players and rewards the developer of the game they love to play! Rather than never knowing or feeling suspicious that player X has an unfair advantage over you & the owners of the sweatshops get to line their pockets at the cost of the developer - simple.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Mark

This game isn't out yet? I've been looking forward to it.

If you have more time than money, then this might still be interesting due to the lack of any sort of monthly fees involved. I can see it being greatly improved if there were some sort of quest system for players to keep track of the menial tasks they're getting paid for, but that's for later iterations of this sort of system.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Charlie Six
http://virtualmerc.blogspot.com
Seems like a big democratic socialism vs oligarchic capitalist struggle going on in the MMO world. Fascinating

When's an MMO gonna have player-run democratic governments??? That'd be wild. One player, one vote.

When's an MMO gonna have player-run fascist governments?? THat'd be wild too. The players with the most victories, wealth, and skill has the most political power. Wild. WILD!

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: JakobM

Well if I am not way off, then the current developments are totally as expected. Its a natural development in the virtual as it will eventually be in the real world. The way to solidarity is through the liberal "capitalistic" roads. Its all about how to create enough wealth to make it beneficial to share it and use it to show your worth. The only problem is that in a world without enough wealth, and with controlled information, there is a need to retain/hoard the power. Its a system well known from biology, animals hoard "wealth" when there is a period of low wealth arriving. If this is not relevant then hoarding will become a meaningless activity. Some might say that there is enough wealth to share with all atm, and this might be true, but this fact is not well known and researched. The claim that it might be so is an attempt to shift a powerbalance if the surpluss is not really there. Well in any case I am a firm believer in the comming "material" utopia. The step after that is to do the same with the information and knowledge, and this is a lot harder mainly because after a material economy the power/influence is based on knowledge and social connections.

Just my five cents..

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Mo

I thought of something interesting about the RedBedlam guy's argument on gold/money exchange. He claims that the exchange is inevitably going to happen, regardless of whether you officially embrace it or not, and I don't argue with that. What I find strange is that they embrace it officially in one direction, money to gold, but not in the other. But if you take his first point to it's logical conclusion, why wouldn't some third party come in to provide the gold to money part, too?

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Tom

That appears to be the entire purpose of their system. In most MMOs, there is a standard transaction where you pay for in-game money. However, this transaction has two participants, the people who trade real-world money for in-game money (the rich), and the people on the other side, who trade in-game money for real-world money (the goldfarmers). You can also think of it as rich users converting money->time and the goldfarmers converting money

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Tom

That appears to be the entire purpose of their system. In most MMOs, there is a standard transaction where you pay for in-game money. However, this transaction has two participants, the people who trade real-world money for in-game money (the rich), and the people on the other side, who trade in-game money for real-world money (the goldfarmers). You can also think of it as rich users converting money to time and the goldfarmers converting time to money.

Anyhow, the point is, as a player looking to buy in-game money, would you rather deal with the official providers of the service, and be sure of an above-board transaction, or deal with the goldfarmers? Basically, the goldfarmers would be competing with the people who run the service. They'd have to compete on customer service, reliability, price, oh, and the fact that you may get your account banned if you trade with a goldfarmer. Also, the goldfarmers would have to do some kind of work to accrue in-game money, while the people that run the world could simply increment the appropriate value.

Independant goldfarmers simply couldn't compete with the ones actually running the system.

And if nobody is willing to trade real-world money for in-game money with anyone other than the owners of the system, then there just isn't a way to get your money out.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Dimitris Batis

Admittedly, this was one of the most interesting interviews on RMTs that I've read. I think it will be quite interesting to see if Roma Victor will prove a successful product and the reaction of gamers in such a payment model, considering the controversy around real money transactions. What I did not find satisfactory was his answers on legal issues that may occur. For instance, the occurence of a severe error that requires a server rollback to be solved may open a great can of worms.

In any case, there's a point I highly agree with Robinson. Despite any objections and the stance of the traditional industry or companies with titles under development (such as Vanguard), goldfarming is a phenomenon that cannot be reversed and simply banning accounts has not proven much of a detriment so far. Some sort of accepting this fact and adjusting your game seems a far more viable answer to goldfarming, as SOE has done with the Station Exchange service.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Adam

Personally, my ideal game is much the same as Rivan's: effort in equals status out. But I'm not naive enough to think that any mainstream game will ever hit that. At some level that ideal has to be enforced by the players themselves, as a community, and as you get larger the idea of that sort of community breaks down rather spectacularly. So either you play a niche game where the player community enforces the strict separation of real world status and ingame status, or you deal with the consequences of breaking that separation.

I'm also not sold on a couple of the answers given in the article. First is the point Mo makes: how do you ensure that you CAN'T go the other way? Not all eBay transactions are gold farmers selling gold for money; legitimate players might end up with a windfall they want to sell for RL money, or they might want to sell their account. If you believe Fraser-Robinson, then the company selling gold to players is going to solve this for you. But even Sony's Station Exchange realizes there's more to it than gold farmers.

The second issue, like Dimitrius above me, is that people still seem to be waving off the issue of legal liability. Fraser-Robinson makes the analogy of an arcade, where you put in a token and get out whatever your skill allows for. But in the arcade example, no one is going to pay me in arcade tokens for doing something for them, and I can't use my 5 tokens to make 50 tokens. So in some sense the analogy doesn't work. (They never do...) So to take a little bit more extreme example, if I build a pool in my castle filled with gold coins, and some bug in your game deletes my pool, you have in a very real sense cost me money, just as if I put a token into the Space Invaders machine and the power goes out. In the latter example, you've cost me 25 cents and at worst I storm out of the arcade in a huff. In the former example, it could easily be hundreds or thousands of dollars.

It's the same sort of issue that might come up with Station Exchange. Suppose warriors are the most desirable class in the game, and I have the most rare and desirable weapon in the game, the Giant Hammer of Stubbing Toes of Dragons, so I try to sell my account for $1000. Tomorrow you release a patch that nerfs the Giant Hammer of Stubbing Toes of Dragons so it's no better than the Giant Sword of Causing Paper Cuts. Now my account is worth $500. Is the company liable for my $500 loss?

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Mark

I would say no, the company is not liable. There'd be a clause in the terms of service absolving the company from liability in the event of devaluation of player accounts - they'd be stupid not to, given their other economic expectations.

I'm sure he was simplifying the legal issue far beyond what he intends to implement. He's taking a very "caveat emptor" perspective on this. As for server rollbacks, they would naturally keep a record of all sales of money separate from the game servers, and in the event of a rollback they'd either refund the purchases since then or give the money back to the characters for whom it was bought. The tone I picked up from the interview was that he seemed to think things like that were obvious.