Let's get real, the publishers start selling gold themself because they want money. It have nothing to do with illegal RMT. They just try to find every excuse possible to justify them doing it.
If they could give some kind of promise that the extra money earned was to clamp down of outside gold sellers, Iwould not only accept this, I would embrace it.
However, trusting a corporation to spend profits for better service, is like trusting a pedophile babysitter.
RMT can be stopped, Guild Wars and Tera (By Aion incompetance of the publisher extension) didn't even try to combat the bot problem until there was an uproar of the community in GW only. And the bots just came back after their one public showing of bot banning.
Anyone with a brain could have banned the dozens of global chat spam bots in Aion's launch. Hmmm these 4 people are spamming the same message about gold selling, for hours on end, ON GLOBAL CHAT, lets not do anything about it. That same producer somehow gets hired to produce Tera and comes up with legal RMT known as Chronoscrolls.
Then you have the greed factor. They take a look around and see that people are willing to lick the boots of developers. See World of warcraft, which had a sub, you buy the box and now a cash shop. No real uproar, just more defense of the game because mounts and pets that follow you around are just cosmetic. Same with Guild Wars 2, hey I paid for the box, but lets defend their decision to squeeze more cash out of me.
RMT isn't ok with me, but the boot licking generation of gamers think it's all fine as long as it's only cosmetic and because they don't pay their own bills.
IMHO it became okay over time. Things change. The people playing MMOs now are not the same people who were playing MMOs back then. The people who were putting 40+ hours a week into vanilla EQ got older, got married, got jobs. Some still play, but they're dwarfed by the new crowd as MMOs turned from being the domain of the nerds and basement dwellers to the mainstream and 'cool' crowd.
MMOs have also changed. MMOs released today generally let you solo to max. in a month or less. MMOs are much more forgiving of failure and not knowing how to play the game. It's the age of the casuals. No longer do you need to be a student, unemployed, disabled or retired in order to play MMOs. Soccer moms play WoW. In vanilla EQ you could (illegally) RMT as well, but people would know right away if you did more than just buying some plat here and there because your playstyle wouldn't match up to your character/gear. Being as group oriented as it was, you had to interact with the server community in order to get some meaningful play out of it. It was frankly much harder to get away with RMT because of that.
Finally, it seems to me that as MMOs became mainstream and thus making more money, developers and publishers became less about the game and more about the money - and it's not just the MMO genre. We're now seeing them trying to pull off day 0 DLC included on the disc that you paid for. The whole gaming industry is changing as a whole and that affects MMOs as well.
Oh, and lets not forget that black market RMT goldfarming has completely infested the more popular MMOs to the point where it's hard for the developers to keep up and tons of resources are spent just on damage control. Resource that could otherwise have been used on more content or better service.
Dunno about you, but when I look at all those factors, it doesn't surprise me that things are the way they are and heading where they are. Like it or not, there's little we can do other than voting with our feet. Personally, I try to look at the bright side and roll with the punches. It's either that or become a bitter MMO vet. I don't have the power to change things... but I do have the power to change how I perceive things and that can make all the difference. So I say - if the rich kid wants to spend his money on a fancy sword, then let him. As long as the game doesn't allow him to use that sword against me and at the same time gives me the option to gain something similar by just playing the game, I'll be okay (or perhaps have said items be so affordable that what I would spend on such things amounts to a monthly sub in an otherwise subfree game).
I'm a big ol' fluffy carewolf. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I've always been an advocate of RMT, as long as it is only on cosmetic or account additions. The whole gold seller scence which ruined WoW for me was obviously going to happen, since there was such a large time investment into the game, of course those with real world resources would want to gain access to stuff that they could pay for rather than exchang time for. Furthermore I think items which can allow for faster leveling (like in Lotro) level up the playing field between those with a lot of time on their hands, and those that have to work 12 hour days.
So I support it completely and see it as the healthy way for a MMO to make money without ever levying a subby on their users.
I don't play any of those games, since GW2 is not out, so I do not know to what extent items effect anything.
I do know that people sold things in game for cash all the way back to Ultima Online, which is different, but same end effect.
I would prefer a sub and no cash shop period myself, and if their is a shop, it be cosmetic....I am also not opposed to DLC, if their is no sub, and the shop does not make it p2w...When I percieve something as p2w, it is when I will not play it.
How true, I'd almost forgotten the auction sites in UO.. but if I recall that was real pay to win.. I remember being able to buy high level items for real cash back then. Its crazy to just ban it alltogether. I think the Gems system thats been mooted for GW2 could be a really good system to control that, and with any joy will deter hackers from going for peoples accounts.. after all there will little motivation to do so, if no profit can be made from proceeds.
It is not nor will ever be ok with me, and that is ok because guess what GW2 fans, I am allowed to feel that way. ANET/NCSoft in my eyes are not any different the EA/Bioware in regards to maximizing profits, now we all know that is why they are in business. They want your money they could really give two craps about pre game support in the end they want your hard earned mony, the question you have to ask yourself is; Are you going to give it to them?
On top of it all they have balls to ask for a full price pre purchase to guarantee a spot in beta, I have never in my 12+ years of MMOs ever seen this done before. A $5 pre order maybe but full price to get into beta are you kidding me, then add the cash shop on top, yeah my spidey senses are tingeling something is not right here.
Drama Queen much?
Star Wars just required a full purchase in order to get in order to play earlier. Early access is normal for most games upon full purchase. What game is only doing htis for 5 bucks down? I'd love to see it.
Now, keep in mind we are not talking about a demo of the game, but a beta. MMOs dont have demos, single player games too, and i bet 99 dollars you're thinking of that.
Let's look at this logically. These guys have been toiling over a game for 5 years with no paycheck from it. They are trying thier best to not make this feel like every clone of an MMO being produced. They've done some amazing new technical stuff with graphics and load time. And yet, here you are, accusing them of somehow trying to take advantage of you because they ask you to buy the game before they give you access to the code. I believe you my friend are the one with the balls.
I could give two craps if they toiled over this game for 20 years, and no SWTOR let just about anyone in on the last beta, if you think it is ok to charge full price to get into a beta you must have issues. TERA charged $5 bucks pre order for all access so really do your homework a little more before you defend this BS.
Now that GW2 is jumping on the RMT bandwagon, people who previously either had no opinion or were vocally opposed to RMT systems are defending it. But there were very good reasons for banning gold selling in other games. Like hordes of players farming for real life profit creating inflation. Now we'll still have those guys to deal with and we'll have even more players farming gold so they don't have to use their own money in the cash shop.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
When Anet decided to use it, it became okay. That's just how brand loyalty works sometimes.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
The only difference between MMOs with cash shops and without is that the ones with them aknowledge that people can RMT
You can go buy gold to get better items and stuff, hell you can even buy bind on pickup items and crap in almost any game if you look hard enough.
And really Video games, or MMOs really are one of the cheapest forms of entertainment there is. It's no surprise that someone will buy stuff in game to save real life hours if they can.
------------------------------------------------- Achiever 20.00%, Explorer 86.67%, Killer 60.00%, Socializer 33.33%
When Anet decided to use it, it became okay. That's just how brand loyalty works sometimes.
LOL, that's certainly what it seems like.
I've been a big GW2 fan for a while now, but I feel like my "fandom" was due to me liking a lot of what ANet has shown me. When they showed me how they were doing RMT...I did not like that, and I've been ranting against it for a while now. I mean, I'm still excited to play GW2, but I am NOT happy about the cash shop implementation.
I am surprised at how many people see absolutely no problem with it though. There was a poll and I think only 20% of the respondants were "against" the cash shop. I'm pretty certain that if you would have conducted that poll for gold/money transactions BEFORE ANet announced how the cash shop worked, those numbers would have been different.
Originally posted by Creslin321 I've been a big GW2 fan for a while now, but I feel like my "fandom" was due to me liking a lot of what ANet has shown me. When they showed me how they were doing RMT...I did not like that, and I've been ranting against it for a while now. I mean, I'm still excited to play GW2, but I am NOT happy about the cash shop implementation.
This pretty much mirrors how I feel about TSW. TSW is worse though. Box price, plus sub AND a cash shop. It makes me want to avoid this game on principle despite how good it looks.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
RMT driven games are designed for teh short term. These developers know the long term effects these things have and the imbalance they cause. But they don't get deterred because there always seems to be a revolving door of new players coming in to check it out.
I remember the 1st time I tired of WoW. I took a break for a few months back in TBC between content releases.
I tired Perfect World. Seemed ok at 1st. Even had similar playstyles to WoW, What did I do? I justified a $20.00 purchase. You know, Because it's what I would have spent on WoW anyway. I don't think we need to explore that game's Cash Shop woes. But then I quit the game soon after. I can assure you PWI loves me more than the free player who never spent a dime after years of playing. Because I am the one who helped pay the bills. So why do they care if I have a balanced economy to play in? As for the long term CS spenders... Well, they don't seem to have many problems succeeding either.
It really sucks for people who want to return to the world they were building every day.
Originally posted by Creslin321 I've been a big GW2 fan for a while now, but I feel like my "fandom" was due to me liking a lot of what ANet has shown me. When they showed me how they were doing RMT...I did not like that, and I've been ranting against it for a while now. I mean, I'm still excited to play GW2, but I am NOT happy about the cash shop implementation.
This pretty much mirrors how I feel about TSW. TSW is worse though. Box price, plus sub AND a cash shop. It makes me want to avoid this game on principle despite how good it looks.
This is how I feel about TSW as well. For one thing I'm already familiar with the Funcom cash shop in AoC and I don't like it or their "freemium" model. On top of that the triple bang seem crazy to me. I'm really disappointed because I've wanted to play in an MMO world like this since I played Parasite Eve on the PS1 and other single player games like it. I can't see that model going over well at all.
FunCom will never see another dime from me until they straighten their act out. And prove it.
Cash shops in games are as inevitable as death and taxes.
Fighting third-party RMT in any game is expensive. For a game developer to seriously fight third-party gold sellers in their game, it would mean hiring a whole lot of extra people, which increases the operating cost of the game. There has to be human intervention when it comes to monitoring players' ingame transactions, because no automated systems can reliably audit the transactions and issue player bans for transgressions. And an unfair ban is a guaranteed lost customer.
Most major game development companies are listed on the stock market, hence they need to increase their profits to keep shareholders happy. Players have consistently resisted monthly sub increases, so the only alternative for the developers is to find other payment models to achieve the desired revenue growth. Combine that fact with the rising popularity of so-called F2P payment models, and you have a witches-brew that creates pervasive cash shops.
EVE Online, World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2 are AAA games that are now implementing legitimate forms of Real Money Trading. All four of these games now allow players to purchase gameplay-affecting items and boosts using real world currencies.
When did this become okay?
I think the real question you wanted to ask is "Why did this become okay?"
Answer: because people who don't have enough time to spend on MMOs want to be able to play them too.
Lets face it, the time expectations for most mmos are completely unreasonable for someone who has a job and at least one other hobby or aspect of their life. As long as this continues to be the case, RMT is a-ok in my book. I'll probably engage in it if I find it won't throw me too far out of character.
I've been a big GW2 fan for a while now, but I feel like my "fandom" was due to me liking a lot of what ANet has shown me. When they showed me how they were doing RMT...I did not like that, and I've been ranting against it for a while now. I mean, I'm still excited to play GW2, but I am NOT happy about the cash shop implementation.
This pretty much mirrors how I feel about TSW. TSW is worse though. Box price, plus sub AND a cash shop. It makes me want to avoid this game on principle despite how good it looks.
This is how I feel about TSW as well. For one thing I'm already familiar with the Funcom cash shop in AoC and I don't like it or their "freemium" model. On top of that the triple bang seem crazy to me. I'm really disappointed because I've wanted to play in an MMO world like this since I played Parasite Eve on the PS1 and other single player games like it. I can't see that model going over well at all.
FunCom will never see another dime from me until they straighten their act out. And prove it.
Plus they're grounded? And no dessert?
Funcom is okay with me, unless they do something goofy like have cash shop currency exchangeable for game currency in TSW. In which case, I won't be playing it.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
Comments
If they could give some kind of promise that the extra money earned was to clamp down of outside gold sellers, Iwould not only accept this, I would embrace it.
However, trusting a corporation to spend profits for better service, is like trusting a pedophile babysitter.
RMT can be stopped, Guild Wars and Tera (By Aion incompetance of the publisher extension) didn't even try to combat the bot problem until there was an uproar of the community in GW only. And the bots just came back after their one public showing of bot banning.
Anyone with a brain could have banned the dozens of global chat spam bots in Aion's launch. Hmmm these 4 people are spamming the same message about gold selling, for hours on end, ON GLOBAL CHAT, lets not do anything about it. That same producer somehow gets hired to produce Tera and comes up with legal RMT known as Chronoscrolls.
Then you have the greed factor. They take a look around and see that people are willing to lick the boots of developers. See World of warcraft, which had a sub, you buy the box and now a cash shop. No real uproar, just more defense of the game because mounts and pets that follow you around are just cosmetic. Same with Guild Wars 2, hey I paid for the box, but lets defend their decision to squeeze more cash out of me.
RMT isn't ok with me, but the boot licking generation of gamers think it's all fine as long as it's only cosmetic and because they don't pay their own bills.
IMHO it became okay over time. Things change. The people playing MMOs now are not the same people who were playing MMOs back then. The people who were putting 40+ hours a week into vanilla EQ got older, got married, got jobs. Some still play, but they're dwarfed by the new crowd as MMOs turned from being the domain of the nerds and basement dwellers to the mainstream and 'cool' crowd.
MMOs have also changed. MMOs released today generally let you solo to max. in a month or less. MMOs are much more forgiving of failure and not knowing how to play the game. It's the age of the casuals. No longer do you need to be a student, unemployed, disabled or retired in order to play MMOs. Soccer moms play WoW. In vanilla EQ you could (illegally) RMT as well, but people would know right away if you did more than just buying some plat here and there because your playstyle wouldn't match up to your character/gear. Being as group oriented as it was, you had to interact with the server community in order to get some meaningful play out of it. It was frankly much harder to get away with RMT because of that.
Finally, it seems to me that as MMOs became mainstream and thus making more money, developers and publishers became less about the game and more about the money - and it's not just the MMO genre. We're now seeing them trying to pull off day 0 DLC included on the disc that you paid for. The whole gaming industry is changing as a whole and that affects MMOs as well.
Oh, and lets not forget that black market RMT goldfarming has completely infested the more popular MMOs to the point where it's hard for the developers to keep up and tons of resources are spent just on damage control. Resource that could otherwise have been used on more content or better service.
Dunno about you, but when I look at all those factors, it doesn't surprise me that things are the way they are and heading where they are. Like it or not, there's little we can do other than voting with our feet. Personally, I try to look at the bright side and roll with the punches. It's either that or become a bitter MMO vet. I don't have the power to change things... but I do have the power to change how I perceive things and that can make all the difference. So I say - if the rich kid wants to spend his money on a fancy sword, then let him. As long as the game doesn't allow him to use that sword against me and at the same time gives me the option to gain something similar by just playing the game, I'll be okay (or perhaps have said items be so affordable that what I would spend on such things amounts to a monthly sub in an otherwise subfree game).
I'm a big ol' fluffy carewolf. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I've always been an advocate of RMT, as long as it is only on cosmetic or account additions. The whole gold seller scence which ruined WoW for me was obviously going to happen, since there was such a large time investment into the game, of course those with real world resources would want to gain access to stuff that they could pay for rather than exchang time for. Furthermore I think items which can allow for faster leveling (like in Lotro) level up the playing field between those with a lot of time on their hands, and those that have to work 12 hour days.
So I support it completely and see it as the healthy way for a MMO to make money without ever levying a subby on their users.
I don't play any of those games, since GW2 is not out, so I do not know to what extent items effect anything.
I do know that people sold things in game for cash all the way back to Ultima Online, which is different, but same end effect.
I would prefer a sub and no cash shop period myself, and if their is a shop, it be cosmetic....I am also not opposed to DLC, if their is no sub, and the shop does not make it p2w...When I percieve something as p2w, it is when I will not play it.
How true, I'd almost forgotten the auction sites in UO.. but if I recall that was real pay to win.. I remember being able to buy high level items for real cash back then. Its crazy to just ban it alltogether. I think the Gems system thats been mooted for GW2 could be a really good system to control that, and with any joy will deter hackers from going for peoples accounts.. after all there will little motivation to do so, if no profit can be made from proceeds.
2002 is when it became popular, but by all means go ahead jump on this bandwagon just like you jumped on the Kony bandwagon.
I could give two craps if they toiled over this game for 20 years, and no SWTOR let just about anyone in on the last beta, if you think it is ok to charge full price to get into a beta you must have issues. TERA charged $5 bucks pre order for all access so really do your homework a little more before you defend this BS.
Now that GW2 is jumping on the RMT bandwagon, people who previously either had no opinion or were vocally opposed to RMT systems are defending it. But there were very good reasons for banning gold selling in other games. Like hordes of players farming for real life profit creating inflation. Now we'll still have those guys to deal with and we'll have even more players farming gold so they don't have to use their own money in the cash shop.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
When Anet decided to use it, it became okay. That's just how brand loyalty works sometimes.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
The only difference between MMOs with cash shops and without is that the ones with them aknowledge that people can RMT
You can go buy gold to get better items and stuff, hell you can even buy bind on pickup items and crap in almost any game if you look hard enough.
And really Video games, or MMOs really are one of the cheapest forms of entertainment there is. It's no surprise that someone will buy stuff in game to save real life hours if they can.
-------------------------------------------------
Achiever 20.00%, Explorer 86.67%, Killer 60.00%, Socializer 33.33%
EKSA
-------------------------------------------------
LOL, that's certainly what it seems like.
I've been a big GW2 fan for a while now, but I feel like my "fandom" was due to me liking a lot of what ANet has shown me. When they showed me how they were doing RMT...I did not like that, and I've been ranting against it for a while now. I mean, I'm still excited to play GW2, but I am NOT happy about the cash shop implementation.
I am surprised at how many people see absolutely no problem with it though. There was a poll and I think only 20% of the respondants were "against" the cash shop. I'm pretty certain that if you would have conducted that poll for gold/money transactions BEFORE ANet announced how the cash shop worked, those numbers would have been different.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
This pretty much mirrors how I feel about TSW. TSW is worse though. Box price, plus sub AND a cash shop. It makes me want to avoid this game on principle despite how good it looks.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
RMT driven games are designed for teh short term.
These developers know the long term effects these things have and the imbalance they cause. But they don't get deterred because there always seems to be a revolving door of new players coming in to check it out.
I remember the 1st time I tired of WoW. I took a break for a few months back in TBC between content releases.
I tired Perfect World.
Seemed ok at 1st. Even had similar playstyles to WoW, What did I do? I justified a $20.00 purchase. You know, Because it's what I would have spent on WoW anyway. I don't think we need to explore that game's Cash Shop woes. But then I quit the game soon after. I can assure you PWI loves me more than the free player who never spent a dime after years of playing. Because I am the one who helped pay the bills. So why do they care if I have a balanced economy to play in? As for the long term CS spenders... Well, they don't seem to have many problems succeeding either.
It really sucks for people who want to return to the world they were building every day.
FunCom will never see another dime from me until they straighten their act out. And prove it.
Cash shops in games are as inevitable as death and taxes.
Fighting third-party RMT in any game is expensive. For a game developer to seriously fight third-party gold sellers in their game, it would mean hiring a whole lot of extra people, which increases the operating cost of the game. There has to be human intervention when it comes to monitoring players' ingame transactions, because no automated systems can reliably audit the transactions and issue player bans for transgressions. And an unfair ban is a guaranteed lost customer.
Most major game development companies are listed on the stock market, hence they need to increase their profits to keep shareholders happy. Players have consistently resisted monthly sub increases, so the only alternative for the developers is to find other payment models to achieve the desired revenue growth. Combine that fact with the rising popularity of so-called F2P payment models, and you have a witches-brew that creates pervasive cash shops.
I think the real question you wanted to ask is "Why did this become okay?"
Answer: because people who don't have enough time to spend on MMOs want to be able to play them too.
Lets face it, the time expectations for most mmos are completely unreasonable for someone who has a job and at least one other hobby or aspect of their life. As long as this continues to be the case, RMT is a-ok in my book. I'll probably engage in it if I find it won't throw me too far out of character.
Plus they're grounded? And no dessert?
Funcom is okay with me, unless they do something goofy like have cash shop currency exchangeable for game currency in TSW. In which case, I won't be playing it.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein