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Why do people pay to not play MMOs? (RMT and Item Malls)
Ceridith
Member UncommonPosts: 2,980
Personally, I just don't 'get' RMT and item malls in MMOs.
Countless people play games that are designed in ways they don't like. Whether it's RMT against the TOS or a sanctioned item mall by the developer that sells 'convenience' items, these players would rather pay to bypass gameplay. But why would someone even bother playing that they not only don't enjoy enough to actually play, but actually pay extra to not play it?
For me the thought of purchasing advancement, convenience, or even vanity items for an MMO seems moot to me, because it makes related achievement feel hollow. I even feel that there mere fact that players can bypass content or purchase achievements devalues my sense of accomplishment of related game content, as it causes me to start equating my time played to the cost to bypass the grind. In other words, it kills the spirit of the game for me.
Personally, if an MMO is too "boring" or "grindy" for me, I simply just don't play it. I'd rather save my time and money and just play a game that's more enjoyable.
How do others feel about this issue?
Comments
From the subject line, that's obvious. From the body of the text - especially when considering how many threads you've participated in on this topic - it's clear you don't want to.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
The people who want it want it for the same reasons that the people who don't want it don't want it.
I explain my reasons for avoiding RMT and Item malls to give context to my question. I'm genuinely curious as to why some gamers seem to have no issue with that fact that they are effectively playing MMOs they they dislike enough to pay to avoid playing them.
Actually, you are making an assumption. A broad one at that.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Some people dont get the fun from playing the game, they get it from winning at the game no matter how, if the RMT sold an "I WIN" button, belive me, it would be sold out in no time.
Then enlighten me, that's the entire point of the thread.
And I'll reword my question:
Why do some gamers prefer to pay to achieve content rather than playing to achieve content in MMOs?
Your assumption is still that people use item malls to skip content rather than experience it. You provide no proof of that claim. Maybe your experience is different from mine (once again, you provide nothing but a claim).
There are a multitude of items available in game shops and they fall into several categories. I'll need some help here to list them all as I'm not a big RMT user myself.
1. Vanity - costumes and pets and such used to make a person stand out from the crowd.
2. Convinience - designed to allow users to speed up gameplay. This is where you are looking with your OP. These items are usually designed to allow a player to advance faster in a grindy game. Usually the grind is in place to make these items more appealling. I consider mounts in this category.
3. Comfort - inventory space, bank space, money space. Not necessarily items, but transactions to make the game more comfortable to play. Once again, mechanics in place make these items more appealling.
4. P2W - Stat boosting items.
In the end, though, this is just another "I hate X, so I can't understand why anyone else likes X" thread. Do you like Dr. Pepper? I can't stand that stuff but my brother drinks it like water. I just don't understand.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
MMOs by their nature require you to "work" to recieve. Some people simply don't want a game to be work. It's that simple really. Even if you come to the conclusion that these people are not true MMO gamers or that MMOs simply isn't for them, doesn't change the fact that there is an alternative for those that doesn't want to come home from work then continue to do work in a game
Whether you accept that explaination or not is entirely up to you. I can tell you this much. There doesn't exist an explanation that's going to make YOU suddenly like RMT and Item malls. If that's what you are looking for then this thread is pointless.
Because people don't play mmorpg's for fun any more they play to compete against others. So if you can get an advantage through RMT or power leveling services alot of people will pay money for that advantage.
Even in video games humans are greedy.
Nothing you said made sense
Is english not your first language?
Gibberish isn't
Are you seriously asking this? My apologies if I appear a little incredulous here, but I thought the rationale was fairly obvious.
Simply put, the reason people pay to achieve content is that many MMOs force you to play through agonizing grinding sessions to get the same items you could otherwise buy in cash shops for free. Would you rather hack goblins for 30 hours to get some key piece of armor, or spend $2 at a cash shop? I certainly would go for the latter.
You really don't get it.
A game has many types of content. Grind, leveling, dungeon, making gold, .....
Some players only like some of the content. To do that, you need to bypass some other ones. Is that so hard to understand?
If I enjoy raiding a great deal, but NOT leveling up, then isn't it VERY logical to pay to level faster?
It is a fallacy to assume all players enjoy all the content equally, and that they value achievement equally. As long as *some* content is gated, there is someone out there who may want to bypass with RMT.
I actually agree with narius here. Because MMOs are a special type of game that even in the most themepark version provide multiple games that are only tangentially related it makes sense if you only like one of the games to pay to avoid the others.
I mean, you drop 60$ on the box and 15$ on the sub, so 10$ one time to cut leveling costs in half is totally worth it.
In their mind they are not paying to by-pass content they are paying for that content. When you pay a monthly sub do you feel cheated from the value of achievements? If you wanted to make a valid statement on ignoring the content of a game, you should have asked why in a subscription game do “hardcore” players rush to end game. Not reading the story or enjoying the environmental atmosphere created for them. But you didn’t ask that. Because you truly don’t care about content.
Why doesn’t some one make an absolutely free AAA MMORPG for you to play? All it would take is a government subsidy. Nothing in life is free. Those things you think are free are payed for by taxes, that mommies and daddies pay every year.
There are four styles of gamers: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and Killers. Move any one of three play styles to the item mall and not a word of protest is heard. Move Killing to the item mall and cries of P2W echo from the four corners of the globe. Everyone knows and accepts that they must pay for the services they receive, and a MMO is a service.
BTW in the rest of the world, "grindy" is simply the effort one must put forth in life to truely earn something in life. Refusing to work for and earn advancement is unimaginable.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
But then wouldn't it be more logical to instead play a game that didn't have leveling in the first place?
Depends. Do you know any games with ingame auction houses, tank and spank holy trinity classes, gear progression and play with around 20 to 40 people killing a single boss you would never in a million years be able to do alone? All this with no levellign curve
I would play a game like that
Wouldn't it be more logical to assume that MMOs have other great things about them besides levelling? Just a thought
Here is how I see it ( not my personal style but how I see the situation )
A lot of people says this "MMO starts at endgame. The leveling process is just to get you there". In that sense, leveing up is not the important part. For many people, time is money. They can spend 10 hours grinding to level or they can spend say 2 hours with some items to speed up leveling and use the other 8 hours to do what they want.
There are people who make hundreds an hour working, there is no reason for them not to spend 10 bux and speed up the repeat process that is just time sink.
Most of the MMO with huge time sink is not to allow players learn their class, it is there as a road bump to slow up people consume limited content. All those players are just removing the bump to the so called "endgame".
I think people just have to realize to play the game they want and NOT to care how others play the game.
I am not against RMT, in fact I have taken part in the buying/selling/trading of accounts in popular MMOs for various reasons. Me and my friends have all taken part in this, we have botted, we have macro'd, afk BGs, you name it. We are the scum of the MMO-universe... but this thread is asking why... and its a good question, here are a few examples from my own history on the subject:
1. Making money... It's funny to think, but when some deals come around for $10 WoW copies me and my friends would pick up 4 copies, then go make 4 new accounts, all with the intention of selling these accounts. Then we would spend a weekend leveling these characters 1-50 through dungeon runs. This was tons of fun for me and my friends (especially after Blizzard added RAF), I love powerleveling and have not found a game that really embraced it since EQ. So we spend a week or two getting guys up to lvl 50-60, then sell off the accounts to the no-name RMTers for a small profit (maybe they will buy these "garbage" accounts for like $40). So... not only would we make a small profit, but powerleveling is fun to us!!!
Similarly back when RFO first came out, me and my friends created a handful of crafters in the game, set up macros for creating one certain shield which sold to NPC vendors for WAY too much. The market for minerals and the Siar Blidend (I remember all the tells from the asian farmers trying to sell us the stuff "You want buy siar?") and sell off the shields you made to the NPC for HUGE profits... we ended up quitting the game after a month, but only after being hundreds of dollars richer for it.
2. FoTM Classes and PvP... one of my friends is a hardcore pvper, he rages hard at me and my other friends when we **** up the arenas or the battlegrounds for him. Or currently we play LoL and I pick "noob champs" and he gets pissed and plays by himself. He more than any of my friends tended to buy/sell accounts in games so he could always have that PvP edge, because he was used to games like CS, DoD, Battlefield, MW where he could quickly be the best. But in the class-based system constantly changing patch-to-patch in an MMO it is not feasible to have all the classes and characters at max level and with max pvp gear, so he would buy/sell accounts to try out different WoW Arena combinations.
3. Out-of-game money for In-game money... really this is a "service industry" in the most general of thinking. Me and my friends are all mostly well off, have very good jobs in the software networking industry, are married and own houses. But with all that we are lacking in free time... seriously lacking. But growing up loving video games and MMOs, playing 10+ hours a day in high school and college, now we want to keep up with the current games and MMOs, but having time to spend farming up items to sell so you can do the end-game content that you want (buying enchants, potions, glyphs) and not to mention the hundreds of respecs for PvP... Well one figures that either you can spend your time in-game doing it, or pay someone else to do it for you if you don't feel like its economical for you to do it yourself...
I always use the oil change example for service industry comparisons. I pay for someone else to do my oil changes, because they can do it in 15 minutes for maybe $50, or I can do it myself in an hour for maybe $20. But to me, my time is worth more than the $30 to me than I would save doing it myself. The service industry is based on this, and RMTers who trade in in-game currency appeal to this market.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Of course not.
If only game A has content 1,2,3 and 4 .. and a player really love content 3 and 4 but hate 2 .. it is logical to bypass 2 by RMT. The key is ONLY game A has content 3 and 4.
Put it this way, if a player really like raiding Dragon Souls and hate leveling, there is NO OTHER GAME he can play that he can raid DS without leveling.
OK, I'll bite.
I recently gave the F2P version of Lineage 2 a try, and after a few good attempts, (2 chars up to 61 and one up to 69) I decided the game is still too grindy for a person of limited play time as myself.
What I don't really want to do is spend 6 months or a year grinding on NPC's at .0001 exp to be competitive in the end game castle sieging activities.
I would gladly pay to level in this title to buy really good exp boosters that would get me to max level in about 3 months or less so I could enjoy the part of the game I'm interested. Problem is, though they offer EXP booster they really don't boost it up enough so no interest to me.
In the end, my play time is too limited to do this game justice, so I had to quit and move on.
But it's a shame really, I would have enjoyed the castle sieges but can't stomach the grind to get there.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
So from the responses so far is seems that, pay to win aside, some players enjoy only certain aspects of the game (dungeons, raiding, PvP), and dislike the other aspects such as leveling or having to farm gold, etc.
As a follow up question in regards to the above...
For those of you who do like convenience related RMT and Item Malls: Would you be interested in playing an MMO that was designed specifically, or otherwise offered a separate server ruleset, to let you bypass the "grind" portion of gameplay and jump right into the 'end-game' content (raiding, PvP, etc)?
I'm not trying to bash those who like RMT and item malls. Simply trying to understand the motivation and see if there is a potential way to make all involved happy. It has been an issue over the years as RMT is against the rules for many MMOs, and additionally "convenience" services being added to games where there was none before having caused turmoil within playerbases.
Because not everyone has 20+ hours a week to waste on grinding. For some of them, they're lucky to play 10-hours a week. But, since they have good paying jobs, or at least a small amount of disposable income, it's easier to pay someone else to get those items so they can do the fun parts.
There's no mystery about it.
That's why a lot of people also buy gold. Or pay for account leveling. Or buy characters/accounts. They simply have more money than time.
I actually LIKE leveling and the constant upgrades, so i never pay to bypass grind.
However, I would say "yes" to the question that some will be interested in a different rule-set server with no grinding.
In fact, WOW has a pvp tournament some time ago doing exactly that .. everyone start with a max level char, with the choice of ANY end-game pvp gear.
In the next expansion, i think WOW will also have "challenge dungeon" that does something similar .. that gear are normalized (so you still have to have a max level char, but at least no or less grind for gear) and you are timed to finish the run as quickly as possible.