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  1. #1
    Ket's Avatar Legendary
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    RMT in SotA

    I disagree with the idea of RMT being a negative in SotA, or any game for that matter. A game that has a strong RMT market shows the true strength of that game in that players enjoy it so much that they are willing spend extra money on it. It is when there is no demand at all for RMT that a game should truly be worried.


    RMT can and will never be stopped. Sure you can ban game accounts, but the cost of bannings will never be remotely close amount of profit made by a seller. It is simply the price of doing business.


    On the flip side, it is also best a game company never get involved in the RMT market. As a player, I never want to feel like the game is being designed to create artificial demand for a in game item that I must buy from a game company. D3 is a great example of this. Just make a great game and let the players decide amongst themselves what is of value.

    RMT in SotA
  2. #2
    Jaerin's Avatar Former Staff
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    It's not the RMT itself that causes the problems, it is the people feeding the RMT generally that diminish the game. Depending on how easy it is to bot, exploit, dupe, ect the economy such that the currencies get deflated quicker than a normal player can play is what ruins a game. I also agree that the game itself runs some serious risk of losing credibility when they get involved in the RMT directly. There will always people an hint of possibility that the company is feeding the market behind the scenes to make money and there is no way to prove or disprove it.

    With that in mind I don't think the D3 RMT auction house was a completely failed experiment, but the D3 game was and how they created that auction house was. Here is the problems that I see:

    1) There were NO gold sinks in the game - gold was ALWAYS going to be deflating in value and the easy botting of the game just made it deflate even faster
    2) Armor/Weapons never left the market ever - Non-binding equipment, equipment couldn't be lost, and always resold meant that an upgrade was simply paying the difference between the item you have and the item you want. Getting to the top was definitely pay-2-win
    3) The artificial floors in the gold price just ended up propping up the market that was already doomed to fail, it wasn't a truly market driven price because there was always a floor

    With that said the one thing that the RMAH added was stability and safety to players that would never have entered the RMT market ever before. If anything is probably net added customers to the RMT markets in general. There were just some fatal flaws in the RMAH that made it an overall failure.

    In hind sight I think they could have made some key changes that would have improved things DRAMATICALLY and made it successful.

    1) Don't allow the selling of items in the RMAH. -- This created many different version of currency conversion from RM to Gold and back. Because you could buy something on the gold AH and then resell on the RMAH and vice versa it caused a lot of confusion for the general player
    2) Put some form of gold sink in the game -- The only gold sink in the game was repair costs and that was tiny in comparison to the amount of gold that you could produce in the game. So gold was never leaving the market unless people got banned or quit. Allow people to gamble it on item chances or put in an item/character improvement system that would remove money from the game
    3) Items had to either be bound or have risk of being lost -- Just like the gold sink, since you would never lose an item and could always resell it the availability of the best items in the game were always going to become more and more common. So you paid 10m for the best current item and a new one pops up for 11m that is better, buy the item and sell your current one for 10m, new best for 1m gold. This is completely pay-2-win by its very definition. If you had to decide to eat the 10m gold you just spent and buy the new item that would be a huge amount of gold out of the game.

    Overall I think the D3 RMAH did a lot to open the eyes of some people to the possibility of RMT in general for all games and brought a lot more competition. The problem is the grey market for currencies is dangerous and filled with scammers, two-timers, and just a lot of bad people. Knowing who to trust is 95% of the game and that makes it a huge turn-off for people.

    So in conclusion, I think that Blizzard had the right idea of bringing RMT into a safe, secure place, but they executed it badly because they didn't know WHY D2 was a good game. They seem to have a real problem with taking things away from the player whether it be exp, gold, items, or whatever. They want everyone to be able to feel like they are pro and the reality is that without risk and without depth the game becomes just a grind. Time = Money, but there has to be a reason to want to invest in the game to begin with before that equation even comes into play.

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