SwagVault MMO Blog

Digging more into RMT

November 7, 2008 – 2:53 am
Posted by: polo

I made Tobold mad… not something nice to do right before Christmas, I suppose.

It started when he made this proposal for the eradication of RMT (bolding is mine, to emphasize the key point):

I think that RMT is possible to eradicate. You just need to make gold “bind on pickup”. That is, you need to remove all possibility of asymmetric trades where one player can give or send gold to another player. And you need to change the auction house system to make it anonymous and blind, so that players can’t buy a worthless rock for 1000 gold and transfer money that way. This is totally possible, but it would have a cost: it would also remove twinking (unless you program a shared bank) and sending money to friends or guild mates. But possible it is, the only thing that is missing is the will of the game companies.

Now, I was really prompted to comment by an anonymous poster in the resulting thread (on whom I unleashed some sarcasm), but my response specifically to this design was to say

Technically, you would have to make every item in the entire world bind on pickup. Eradicate all forms of trade. Remove healing. Remove grouping. Remove all forms of assistance between one player and another.

Tobold disagrees, and perhaps feels that the sarcasm was directed at him (it wasn’t, and if he thinks so, I apologize).

In a typical example of how little developers are open to new ideas, Raph tries to discredit me by saying that my proposal to remove asymetric trade is equivalent to removing groups and guilds and all forms of cooperation from MMORPGs. Apparently he didn’t understand or chose to ignore the important word “asymetric”. A group in which one person tanks, another person heals, and other people deal damage is *not* asymetric as long as the characters involved are of roughtly the same level.

OK, to tackle key points one at a time…

1) Is this a new idea?

No, of course not. After all, bind on pickup, level limits for grouping, level limits for item usage, and so on are exactly this design, just now it gets applied to currency (thereby making it, well, not actually a currency). This is the natural extrapolation of that, in some sense, except that if anything it does not go far enough — many systems simply acknowledge that there is no “currency” and turn it into “points” instead, which is more accurate.

So, not only not a new idea, but not even radical. In fact, this idea is precisely in the midst of the prevailing current of MMO design, a simple step further along the “massively single-player” trend that is prevalent today.

Ironically, the systems we could point at include things like NeoPets, GoPets, and most of the item-sale driven Korean MMOs, many which explicitly bar transfer of currency from user to user because it suits their business model.

To go further, a much more rigorous design exploration of this idea than Tobold offered can be found in Randy Farmer’s three year old KidTrade proposal. In it, Randy lays out the actual chain of design consequences that lead you to RMT:

Twinking[1] is a design choice. Muling[2] is a design choice. These are built on gifting, another design choice. Gifting is person-to-person transfer of virtual goods. Just add private messaging (email or IM) and some trust, and gifting becomes trading[3]. Most designers figure this out (eventually) and implement a trading machine interface to remove the trust requirement. Introducing object scarcity increases the play value sufficiently that, when combined with a large enough target audience, you only need to reintroduce trust to create the incentive for an external marketplace to thrive, like eBay. GOM even removes the trust requirement again by implementing deposit/withdrawal ATMs in Second Life.

So, the steps on the virtual economy slippery slope are:

Gifting → Twinking
Gifting + Multiple Chars/Server → Muling
Gifting + Messaging + Trust → Trading
Trading – Messaging – Trust + In World Machinery → Robust Trading
Robust Trading + Scarcity + Liquidity → External Market (eBay)
External Market – Trust + In World Machinery → GOM
2) Can you actually remove asymmetry?

Tobold’s key point is that it is asymmetrical trades that are the problem. As he said in the comments thread here,

You don’t have to remove the ability for players to trade or help each other to remove RMT. You only have to make sure that people can’t trade nothing for big amounts of gold, which opens up the possibility of a real world counterpart of trade.

There are some design assumptions packed into that sentence that need to be dug into very deeply. Let’s look at the key sentence:

You only have to make sure that people can’t trade nothing for big amounts of gold

People, trade, nothing and big, and gold. Each words that carry a lot of freight.

a) people.

Starting with “people:” even Tobold stops to make room in this word, to allow for a practice that ironically, used to be a bannable offense in many games:

Sending it to your own twinks could be enabled, for example with a shared bank account.

The word “twink” was derogatory in origin. In common parlance on muds, it meant “pathetic loser who can’t earn their own way,” not to put too fine a point on it. Then it became a verb, and it meant “to help the pathetic loser do stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t otherwise.” The very core of RMT! It is somewhat ironic to make an exception for this case here, but the reasons why are subtle and interesting, and reveal why saying “people” is problematic.

Tobold (and others who twink alts) will rightly say “I am not pathetic because they are all me, and I did in fact do the work once!” The problem is that the game cannot necessarily tell. In short, all the RMT practices we dislike become not only acceptable but admired depending entirely on what two people are doing the trade.

Heck, it’s often not even fair: the recipient of the high-level sword may be seen as a twinked cheater, while the high-level who donated it out of the goodness of his heart might be seen as a generous soul. Sometimes giving to a stranger is good, sometimes it’s bad.

The computer cannot, by and large, tell the difference between people. It does not know whether there is a trust relationship between two characters or not. It does not know, by and large, what the difference is between two people who are the best of friends for years, and play together in the same guild and one gives a cool sword to the other; and a guy who just joined the guild temporarily in order to do an RMT trade to gift a high-end sword using a guildie exception in the system, or something.

Can this deeper knowledge be tracked by the servers so that it can tell the difference? Yes. But you will never get an automated system that fully works here.

b) trade

There is a misconception here that “trade” involves physical objects. It also includes services. Therefore, it may not go through any sort of server-visible process at all. If I pay someone to hang around me and heal me continuously, the server does not know why that person is doing so. They can be grouped with me, too.

c) nothing and big

The value of “nothing” is completely relative. The value of “big” is also completely relative. And this goes double in a level-based system with item limits, where the value of big is designed to obsolesce as you advance. Detecting a trade of relative inequity can only be done by imposing an external value system on top of the game. For example, measuring objects solely by their utility, or the level at which you first access them.

This, of course, ignores the many other areas in which we ascribe value, such as emotional content, collectibility, etc. Black dye tubs (worth about 1 gp in UO, like any other dye tub) would have transacted completely invisibly under a price comparison system, despite black dye going for hundreds of dollars on eBay at one point.

The fact that we can even contemplate the notion that objects within the game have a single fixed and universal value demonstrates that we have already moved well beyond any notion of normal economics whatsoever…

d) gold

There’s a long-established history within both the real world and the virtual that if you disallow one currency for free exchanges, players create a new one. It happened in muds when mudflation hit, it happened on Meridian 59, it happened on UO, and it will ALWAYS happen. This is why people who dig into this design issue don’t stop at disallowing exchanges of gold, but instead disallow exchanges of everything.

All that is required for an item to become a viable alternate currency is for it to meet the following criteria:

massively portable
available enough
scarce (not infinite)
freely tradable
This could literally be a bit of fluff from a bathrobe pocket.

Of course, there is also the mistaken notion that RMT requires any game-defined currency at all. Because it doesn’t — it works perfectly well using barter.

OK, so let’s go back to that sentence:

You only have to make sure that people can’t trade nothing for big amounts of gold

There are four glaring bugs right there to exploit. Let’s think about it. Tobold says we can preserve grouping. So,

let’s have an agreement that you pay me real world money for me to group with you, and I heal you when you need it.
Let’s say I heal you, but you give me a small amount of currency every time I do it so that the system doesn’t see it as “asymmetrical.”
Let’s say you give me pocket fluff, which happens to be collectible to some freaks who dig gathering items.
Let’s say you give me an item that the server says is of the right value, even though I know I am about to level to the point where its effective value to me drops to zero.
That sentence simply isn’t verifiable by a computer. What is verifiable is to be more drastic, and disallow all trading of any sort.

The fundamental truth that has to be confronted here is that all trades are always asymmetrical. That is the point of trading. You trade for mutual improvement. A successful trade is where both parties got something of greater value. The only way for this not to be the case is for you to be trading the exact same thing.

This is why we don’t speak of “equal” trade, but instead of “fair” trade.

Let’s consider some examples:

Healing is *not* an asymetric trade, as long as the healer is of roughly the same level as the person he is grouped with.

Nonsense. A person paid to stand in the group and heal you endlessly is certainly asymmetric. For that matter, it’s frequently aysmmetric even in regular play, if the other group members are not doing their job.

Class-based play itself is asymmetric. Everyone does something different for someone else. You are suggesting that because it translates to the same amount of XP, it is therefore symmetric. But in fact, the costs for the different folks to provide the service are different, the overall pace of advancement is different, the risks undertaken are different… Class-based — heck, team-based play of all sorts — is based on inequal contributions. We might say that everyone on the team is just as important to the final outcome, but they are not contributing the same thing.

And as soon as we say that, we have to acknowledge that they are not measurable on the same scale. 500 points of healing is not “worth the same” as 500 points of damage dealt to our mutual enemy. Heck. 500 points of healing to the tank is not worth the same as 500 points of damage absorbed by the tank. It depends on how hard it is to supply the healing, and how hard it is to be a tank with that many HP. To top it off, 1 point of healing when the mob is almost dead and so is the tank, and it makes the difference between the raid wiping and success is way more valuable than 500 points of healing under other circumstances.

Lets have a look at a real world example: A politician needs his house renovated, and the work to be done has a independantly estimated market value of $50,000. If the builder send the politician a bill for $50,000 and the politician pays it, we have a symmetric trade, and everything is fine. If the builder send the politician a bill for $1,000 and the press gets wind of it, everybody will assume that an illegal counterpart for this asymetric trade occured, like the politician getting a big city contract to the builder.

Raph saying that to prevent asymetric trade you have to eliminate all trade and cooperation in the game is like saying that a politician shouldn’t be allowed to renovate his house or buy anything at all. It is an invalid extrapolation, trying to make a reasonable request seem crazy by exaggeration.

In general, there’s two classes of folks who absolutely have to think like exploiters: exploiters themselves, and designers. Ordinary players don’t need to. Even a random glance at the newspaper headlines would show that the above scenario happens constantly, and that removing dollars from the equation would hardly solve the problem.

Even with currency in the politician example, you forgot to launder the currency, which is exactly what a gold farmer/RMTer would do — already does. But without money, there’s “mutual backscratching” agreements. There’s influence peddling. Even a no-cash system has plenty of vulnerabilities.

You have to be more evil in order to think of all the ways to circumvent these rules. After all, there’s a flourishing RMT trade in those exact same MMOs I referenced that have no currency.

The bottom line: the only way to eradicate all RMT is to eradicate player interaction.

Whew, all that to arrive at the philosophical part. The question for me is a “baby with bathwater” one. What are we giving up by trying to eliminate RMT?

As I have pointed out, one of the immediate consequences is the loss of altruism. We are so worried about preventing cheating that we forget that the line between cheating and generosity is invisible to a computer. We have gone from a virtual world where you donated excess items to the playerbase as a whole, to one where you cannot stop to help a stranger who is about to get killed.

We also have introduced incredible amounts of social friction, literally telling people “you are not allowed to play together” because we are worried about cheating. They can’t group, they can’t trade stuff, they can’t have a fun time together.

In the name of clear stratification of items and values, we have reduced personalization, user expression and creativity, and forced everyone into wearing “optimal” gear, or displaying their status via “complete sets.” We make it actively disadvantageous to look different from what the designers specify is the “right” look for a given level.

With the intent of reducing player interference with other players, we have gradually removed more and more ways of interacting with the world, so that indirect effects (good or bad) cannot happen.

Tobold said in his most recent post,

Over at Raph’s some commenters propose removing “bind on pickup” and “bind on equip” features altogether. That shows a disturbingly naive view of human behavior. To anyone with half a brain it should be obvious that if you make all items in the game tradeable, you would much increase RMT. Especially in a game like WoW, where raid epics are designed to be accessible only to a small percentage of players. Next thing you’d see would be the “Chinese Raiding Guild”, just keeping the most essential epics for themselves and selling the rest for dollars.

Let’s picture this world, actually. No bind on pickup, no level limits. There would likely be so many raid epics out there that they would be pretty worthless. You would certainly start seeing newbs with raid gear. They’d be better off, but not invicible, because they don’t have the stats and skills to fully take advantage of what they are wearing. They’d go after tougher stuff, and probably have fun. They’d be the classic fantasy hero stripling given the magic sword before they know how to use it.

They might last less time as subscribers. Because they’d get through the content faster. But they would have been able to spend that time with their friends, because grouping limits would not be there either. It’s a world where everyone is over the top, wearing garish stuff, merrily slaying five dragons before breakfast. Mudflation is insane, and probably the game admins have to do playerwipes periodically just to restore sanity.

There are certainly negative effects. But I’d argue that one effect is that there wouldn’t much RMT at all. There’s nothing there that is scarce. It’s a world of munchkin power-happy dragonslayers.

Is it “worse”? I don’t think so. Unlike most modern MMORPGers, I have actually played that world, because it was common on muds. It works just fine.

It is worth pointing out that while early UO was the location of the birth of the modern gold farmer, near as I can tell they had a much less pernicious effect on the overall game culture than they seem to in all the level-and-class based games. Perhaps because

real value in many of the most valuable items in UO lay in personal desire for them, not in stats: rares, not magic swords.
everyone was more equal. The original hit point spread was from 30 to 100, for example, and that was it.
there were no restrictions on trade, grouping, or item use whatsoever.
there also wasn’t the incredibly static spawn structure we see common today, along with the very static and item set, of course; farming is easier when your targets stay put and are so highly specific.
What sold for the big bucks? Gold was useful, but if you bought gold it was to buy a house, a rares collection, a boat, cool clothes. Maybe you needed a few hundred gp in order to get enough reagents for tonight’s dungeon run. RMT was a means to an end.

My problem here is that players do not even get the choice to prove that they would really prefer a game without RMT, because developers aren’t open to new ideas that could actually remove it.

Players can prove it right now by simply not buying anything. On the count of three. One, two…

Markets exist because of demand.

In the end, I also end up where Tobold does: that Darniaq is right when he says that RMT “exposes the underlying truth of mass acceptance of inequality.”

The disagreement between Tobold and myself here is that he is attempting to preserve the inequality, and therefore is working to find ways to more rigidly enforce it.

I just don’t give a crap one way or the other. I’ve had fun in worlds where everyone is equal. I’ve had fun in worlds where everyone is not. There exists a spectrum here. What I do know is that I want more fun.

And removing trade, currency, grouping with friends, gifting, altruism, and economics makes the game a hell of a lot less fun. It is a cure worse than the disease.

Are gold farmers a plague? Sure. Fix the game design. Trading isn’t broken, your incentive structure is.

From: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/12/23/digging-more-into-rmt/