The Daily Grind: What's the best way to curtail RMT activity?

by Akela Talamasca on Apr 11th 2008 8:00AM

Guild Wars, Business models, Economy, Exploits, Making money, Opinion, The Daily Grind, Legal

As noted in our recent Guild Wars post, there's more than one way to skin an RMT cat, if you'll forgive a labored metaphor. Quite aside from simply hunting the farmers down and feeding them to the Sarlacc beast, banning and possible litigation are merely the most commonplace ways to deal with these issues. Clearly, this problem isn't going to just fix itself or go away, and many have lost accounts thanks to these activities.

Have we seen the best solutions to the RMT crisis? What hasn't been tried yet?

Tags: gold-farmers, guild-wars, litigation, RMT, sarlacc-beast, tdg, the-daily-grind

Reader Comments (2)

Gold farmers should be marked for PK, Dont ban em! they have good loot I can take...

The easiest way is to implement passive measures that decrease the probability of farmers being successful from the start. If the economy of a game presents hurdles that *most* normal gamers can't overcome without pulling their hair out then they will at least be tempted to make use of outside sources to acquire currency. Lineage 2 for example gives you nothing at the start, presents you with a grind that is just absurd, and then they wonder why they have such a huge botting/Ebay problem. On top of that they don't soulbind high end items so the best gear in the game is for sale one way or another.

If you set out to make a game that would, from the outset, present a perfect environment for RMT you'd come up with something eerily similar to L2. The fundamentals of it just lend themselves to RMT whereas I simply can't see why most casual gamers would ever buy gold in WoW. Even if they did it would just be for an epic flying mount and that's about it. Seriously...what else CAN'T you buy that you would want to with the easy money that is to be made in WoW?

There's always going to be farmers in WoW simply because it's huge and a certain percentage of gamers will always see RMT the same as using a Game Shark: it gets them to the only part of the game they like and does so without them having to expend the time/effort that they loathe.

Again, the way that the games are structured will determine how much RMT is wanted by the players. Make things obscenely stupid and the few that stay will see where it makes sense to swipe the Visa in order to get a boost, not over their fellow players, but just to get the basics that they feel they never could have gotten otherwise.