PoE Real money pros and cons

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Jojas wrote:

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Nyruami wrote:

You may want to keep your pink glasses on, truth is, the vast majority of gaming companies already work together with RMT.

Truth is, this an opinion not a fact. Don't you find it strange that in all those years that RMTs exist, there was never anyone - be it from the developers or the publishers or the RMT sites - not a single person that went public saying 'Yes, this is so'? With all the fluctuations, all the stress, all the ups and downs, all the hiring and firing that come with this business - from all the thousands or maybe tens of thousands people involved: nothing, noone, ever?
Why do you think this is so? Is there some kind of Omerta going on?

If you can cite such a someone, please do. But if you cannot, on what other facts do you base your 'truth'?

What thousands of people are you taling about? Only the top management of both companies need to be involved. I don´t know where you work, but I doubt your GM sends you regular emails about his decisions. So more likely there are a few dozen of persons involved, and those persons have signed contract with very restrictive non-disclosure agreements. None of them will stand up to tell the terrifying thruth. Especially as this truth isn´t terrifying at all. It´s perfectly legal and actually not even morally wrong.

On the other hand, tobacco concerns knew for more than 20 years before it came to the public that smoking is a serious risk to the health. In these concerns way more people was involved and knew about that. Why did none of them stand up? Ever? In more than 20 years? And we are talking about killing several million people worldwide per year, not doing something which actually nobody would even care about, besides you of course.

If there were moral qualms leading persons whit such a knowledge to spread it, don´t you think it would have happened there? As even those persons had no problems with keeping their knowledge to themselves, why should someone knowing about business relations between a gaming company and a RMT-site, which i cannot stress often enough is perfectly legal and not even morally wrong, stand up to spread the word, break his contract and eventually get sued for all he ever owned and ever will own? Just to make you sleep better?

Just read the signs, they are there. In summer 2007 WoW-Gold was very hard to get. Most RMT-sites have been sold out, the prices for gold exploded, and then, out of a sudden, every site was stocked to the roof, the price dropped by 75%. Tens of thousand new farmers in china who started to work in the same month? Or a new agreement, giving the RMT-sites access to unlimited amounts of gold for a cut of their profits?

Of course I cannot be sure about that, as you already pointed out, we will only know for sure if some of the managers will stand up to tell us the truth.

Maybe you heard about Oakham´s razor. It´s a philosophical construct to verify different theorems about the same fact. And it´s only rule is, the more assumptions you have to make to get to your result, the less likely it is true. Or stated otherwise, if there are different theories trying to explain the same fact, in most cases the one needing the least amount of assumption will be the correct one.

You assume: Gold/Credits/Orbs/You name it are all gathered by highly organized chinese criminals, letting tens of thousands of young men and women play in huge depots, one PC beside the other. Other highly organized criminals hack computers all over the world to acquire gamers accounts to rip anything they own, while still other highly organized, yet not criminal, subjects have serverfarms full of computers running thousands of bots.

Further you assume that there is a perfectly organized global logistical infrastructure to transfer those ingame funds from the slave drivers / hackers / botters to the accounts of wholesellers

Further you assume that there is another perfectly organized global structure to further transfer all of these funds from the accounts of the whole sellers to the accounts of the RMT-sites who then sell it to the gamers. Not to mention that they need to be able to spread their coins over multiple servers, which also is no easy task to perform.

And at last you assume every person working in the gaming industry is a complete moron, not able to track ingame currency trades with a volume way over the volume of a "normal" player-player trade.

So now check my assumptions:

I assume the gaming companies gave accounts to the RMT-companies with sort of GM privileges, so they can make the gold/credits they need for their next trade directly on the server the trade will happen. The gaming companies track how much gold these accounts spawned and send the bill once a month.

So strictly following Oakham´s razor, what do you think is more probable?

This sounds very plausible but for me it does not add up. If - as you say - only the top management needs to be involved - how can you at the same time assume that - according to what I say - 'every person working in the gaming industry is a complete moron'? If only the top management is involved, what did they do? Tell the developers that countermeasures against RMT are a no-no?
This is why I say thousands or tens of thousands have to be involved - actually pretty much every programmer and by extension the people the programmers work with - otherwise the sytem could not work.

You do not consider that developers look over each other's shoulders. One can assume that it would be extremely difficult if not outright impossible too keep everybody not directly involved in the dark. After all, developers are teams - much more so than your everyday office people - they work together to create synergies, and they also chat and gossip, they share their ideas and often their lifes.
And they are not the Mafia and there is no Omerta like code.
So how do you think could such a huge - and if actually existent, blatantly obvious - thing go unnoticed?

What you also do not consider is that balancing the economy of an online game is a delicate business. Among other factors, the more a game economy is influenced by RMT the more unstable it becomes. With RMT the playerbase divides, the rich get richer, the poor stay poor, and eventually the largest part of the playerbase - the casual players - wanders off. So allowing RMT in and sharing their profits can actually have only one goal: Fast money.
And regarding this: Don't you think that publishers and developers want their product to be successful? As in the 'WoW-Killer'? Do you really think that ALL the whole industry cares about is fast money?

It is hard to argue against one's opinion when everything either party can say is based on a lack of known facts. So basically it boils down to what makes more sense (whatever that means).
I think what you say does make sense, but at the same time it does not. But neither of us have the whole picture.

Considering Occam's Razor: The scenario 'highly organized chinese criminals' is perfectly viable. Not only that, there actually are known facts that support this. On the other hand your scenario of an industry wide conspiracy can be supported by the fact that by no means it would be the first industry wide conspiracy in the history of humankind.
But either scenarios are so weird that I think Occam's Razor cannot be applied here.

Uh.... most companies actively try to stop it. I mean, I fully agree with you, nyruami, in principle, that there is TONS of money to be made, and what you describe is possible, but I don't think it's the simplest. The simplest is for the company to either try and stop it and fail, giving up, or take part.

For example, blizzard takes a cut of sales, and like you say, they could also take a cut of anything they want: selling godly items for 250 bucks a pop, easily. The auction house doesn't identify the seller at all, it wouldn't be hard to have a very small staff maintain something exactly like this, a few shill accounts managed by a small team with item creation privileges, that aren't logged in any way. That money could simply be fed straight into RMAH profits without too many eyes turning, and wouldn't need much staffing to be legitimate sales without having to bring anyone else in who could leak the usage this way.

On the other hand, blizzard actively bans botters. Take a paw through blizzhackers and the like, the shady bot sites. These guys do get hit, and in waves. Why?

Because the SIMPLEST solution to making money is keeping it in house. Less farmed gold, items, bullshit, less bots, less inflation: more purchases, more vig for the bobby.

That's easily the simplest. While building a secret, underground "we won't ban ya if yeh give me 25% of your take, buddy" could very well happen, it's unlikely because someone would probably drop the ball on the secret at some point. In the case of D3, they'd rather it just get sold in the RMAH, so bobby gets a cut: I'd be willing to bet they don't ban botters who only RMAH the their finds.

Possible solutions:

1.Make a minimum level to post on notice board or global chat.
-How this would work:
Players would only be able to post after level 3 (for example)

-Why this would work:
Players could no longer post "come to goldfarmers dot com" until after playing for at least 20 minutes. This would at least make it a pain to create spam bots.

-Limitations:
a)It is possible that players may wish to chat globally from the moment hey start playing.
b)Gold farmers could still make higher level spam bots, it would just take longer.
c)Those who wish to buy "gold" can still find those sites if they want.


2.Add a minimum level for carrying(and therefore trading) items.

-How this would work:
Characters can only pick up items with an item level equal to their level +10 (for example)
GGG would have to add item levels to currencies of course

-Why this would work:
"gold farmers" are generally super low level, as there is a chance of getting caught by measures already in place, and being deleted.

-Limitations:
a)Farmers could make high level characters in order to make trades, and risk the time lost.
b)GGG would have to have some sort of tracking system to catch dodgy trades in the first place.
c)Perhaps there is a situation where a super low level character would be legitimately giving a high level item to a high level player?


There's two ideas should be easy to implement,and would very minimally impact legit players. Anything to slow down the farming is a plus.

I saw the argument "If you cant beat them join them", and to do so the poster claimed that GGG could "hand over" currency items to these RMT websites. Lawl.. just lawl.

All GGG can really do is their best to combat bots, and the accounts that use them. It may be a hopeless battle as someone else claimed, but I would prefer that GGG continue to fight the good fight. Its very rare to see ethical and free to play in the same sentence.

Did my amazing post kill this thread? No! Be reborn and let all bask in my awesomenessness!
or whatever. just though it'd get a comment =)

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Stcecil wrote:

... we’ll have to deal with it for a while.

Here's how I choose to deal with it: I will continue to curse and deride anyone who openly admits to using such, and will not support such offsite companies myself. If everyone did this, they would go away.

Nyruami and Jojas had an interesting conversation going. Why did you stop?

I'm still not convinced who is right, both sides provide solid, logical arguments.

Keep it up, a good read indeed.

In my opinion, people play video games because they enjoy playing it. The reason behind all this, is simply to have fun. Some people have fun playing competitively, while the others enjoy more a casual style. And if some dude thinks he can have more fun playing this game by spending money on virtual stuff that makes him stronger in game, even though it's kinda illegal, we should have no problem with that.

But I do agree that this action has bad influence over the economy.
You're simply creating orbs that actually don't exist. It's like counterfeiting of money.

I'm about to open up a can of truth:

I hate pay2win. I hate the idea of somebody bringing real-world wealth into a video game to gain power over other players.

HOWEVER, consider this: The only place where that really matters is in a competitive environment. People don't like pay2win because they don't want someone beating them in a competition just because they used the power of their wallet. But the only really competitive environments in PoE are the temporary leagues. 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours or even 1 week are simply not enough time for the "real-money-trade" websites to amass enough wealth to really make a difference in that competition.

So, the impact can really only be felt in the Default and Hardcore leagues. The competitive leagues will be almost completely immune to it.

Think about it.