Few Reasons Why RMTs Will Never Go Away!

yah I'm sure if it was only a pretext for kick it, but our leader is a good player (only have only 2 job 1 with relic) he make the relic with the ls (and the ls have pay days and 100fl), and only 3 time kick ppl in 2 years

There would be no RMT if people wouldn't buy gil. However, the demand is so huge, almost 1/3rd of all players admit to buying gold/gil, and added with industry estimates of those who do but won't admit it, it's probably closer to 2/3's of all players.

The problem isn't the RMT. They are filling a market that players demand. The real problem is MMO game designs which rely on artificial rarity and artificial time investment to create virtual value as their primary arguably ONLY method of creating fun. As long as the effort in getting an item is less fun than the e-peen value of having an item, because of how your game is designed, you will lose the RMT war.

These aren't little individual guys farming gil and selling it on eBay. These are huge, multi-national corporations employing 10,000+ people at a time, in long warehouses converted to makeshift barracks. A lot of them actually own the sites you frequent, like Allakhazam. They bring in, quite literally, over two billions dollars per year in gold/gil sales alone. And because most are already behind international proxies to get around governmental regulation anyway, blocking them by country IP is worthless.

As for sueing those who RMT, EULA's are not god. MMO companies don't just get to put in whatever they want. Most industry experts and legal scholars agree that half the agreements in MMO EULA's wouldn't hold up in court already. The developers are terrified of going to court over any of this, because they would probably get bitchslapped. (Look what happened to Linden Labs.) Not to mention, as long as 2/3's of players secretly want RMT, they don't want to spend the legal fees fighting something if it's going to end up more expensive than the damage RMT is causing already.

Prohibition doesn't work when a majority of your population wants something. Blizzard and SE are the only ones still fighting this battle. Most other studios, right now, are actively involved in figuring out how to design next-gen MMO's where RMT is sanctioned and standard, without screwing up balance.

I think SE has done a good job geting rid of RMT and individuals who abuse the system. Who do you think is winning? What you ask makes no sense because if is hard to make a million gil and you QQ about this game, then is time for you to go to WoW.

Would you rather go back a few years where people are hacking the system into fishing NOBLE's beds? Jacking up the price of Haubergeon Armor to 13MM?

Is like QQ over at an airport security point complaining why you have to take your belt, phone, shoes, not carry more than 10k cash, to be or not be on a watch list, report items in customs, and so on. Or would you rather go back and let a shoebomber or any phanatic with C-4 on a suitcase blow up the Airplane you are flying on?

The more challenging the game is made is SE's assuming control not only to protect their interest, also the price we pay for not having RMT's run the economy. So deal with it and go craft your jobs to 60-100 find a niche market and make good gil.

I'm glad to be on the 2/3 of people that DO NOT BUY gil from RMT's or pay to BURN their jobs, then again I'm am SE's sucker for having a few mules to store all the crap I have from those high level crafts i've done. Ironic, isn't it?

ppl will always QQ about something...its best just to ignore these losers and go about our business. Anyone need some gil? /troll

Dubont hurts my feelings and makes me cry. :(

SUCCESS!

this estimate alone is pretty damned funny, since if it's true, it means these(and most other) forums are populated with a LOT of holier than thou bald-faced liars

this would be really hard, i think. most people buy gil/cheat because it gives them a game breaking advantage.

i don't think people will pay nearly as much for in-game "trinkets."

i'm not saying it's impossible to do, but i'd imagine it would be very, very difficult


again, i guess i'm repeating myself, but this would also be very, very hard. we spend mabye 100 hours on a "fun" single player game. we can spend years logged into an MMORPG. when it takes a massive budget and an amazing amount of man-hours to create something like oblivion or mass effect, which provides mabye 100 hours of fun content at the outside, the cost of creating years worth of "fun" programming is well-nigh unimaginable.

MMO's kinda HAVE to trade on another incredibly powerful force, the human ego. this allows them to keep an audience well after the actual content has run out. i'm not sure it's financially feasible to make every moment of final fantasy as truly "fun" as, say, playing god of war 3.

Pretty much.

Korean MMO's have been doing it successfully for decades. So does EVE Online and others. Their RL<->In Game conversions are so freely bi-directional on a macro-economic scale, they even let you pay for your monthly account subscription with in-game currency.

I bought gil a few weeks ago, *** never sent it to me.

HNM shells sells hard to get items, n00bs who want said item buy gil. HNM shells = RMT contributor.

that makes me intensely curious as to how they've pulled it off, but i suppose google can answer that question for me as well as you can

they aren't contributers, they're simply a reflection of the intrinsic virtual value-based structure of ffxi. when you make items that aren't fun to get, but provide ego-based rewards, SOMEONE will appear to meet the demand for said items. in this case, it happens to be select HNM shells.

hnm shells aren't the disease, they're just a symptom.

The only reason it seems hard is if you assume all MMO's must follow the FF11 model of game design. Admit it: it was not fun spending 3 hours at a time at strange times in the middle of the day/night camping say, Faffy for X months to get your item. The fun came from having the item. And once you had it, you retroactively convinced yourself all those hours were fun, even if you spent most of the time frustrated, angry, and muttering "this is HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE."

The act itself was not that fun. Getting the stuff at the end was fun. The prestige and accomplishment of killing the thing was fun. But the actual gameplay itself was pretty damn tedious. The more tedious and more frustrating, the more valuable the item or accomplishment seems in hindsight.

As long as your game design's only accomplishment vector is time investment, and your only value vector and economic leverage is artificial rarity, you will never succeed against RMT who offer a quicker and arguably more fun way to accomplish the same thing.

The amount of time it takes to get the prestigious item is half of the satisfaction I get from owning it.

If I simply bought in game currency to get the best equipment and items possible I'd be very bored.

I've done it before in a game called Atlantica online.

i didn't retroactively convince myself of anything, i know it's not fun. i'm just pretty vain. i don't go to the gym for the health benefits. i'm a perfect example of the personality type that gets trapped in games like XI.

still, i think that making something fun for its own sake requires intensive, well thought out programming, something it's not feasible to do for the amount of man-hours a hardcore player invests into an mmo. if you know of an MMO that is truly fun, i'd love to play it.

If the game is designed poorly, yes. One of the problems with building RMT into an MMO is that you must devalue the effect that gear and currency has on in-game accomplishment as you advance, and provide alternative methods to attain prestige and have fun at the high end. Otherwise once you've bought yourself all the best stuff, what's left to do?

FF11 basically has no accomplishment mechanism outside of gear and gil, so it would never work and I'm not arguing they should change. Fighting RMT to maintain their economic and achievement system is pretty much all they can do.

Your point also may explain why industry estimates are that 2/3's of all MMO players have bought gil, but not everyone is running around filthy rich with all the best lewt. People use it to give themselves a small boost here and there, but realize there would be nothing left to do if they carried it through to its logical conclusion in a game like FF11.

You and me both, dude. I don't go to the gym for the health benefits either. I'm not trying to argue condescendingly from on high here as though I'm any different, just trying to explain the thinking of many people in the industry these days.

i'm not thinking of this as an argument. more like you being a guest lecturer at a college who knows things that i'd like to know as well.

gotta go do omega though. see? trapped. ><

I still actually enjoy battling in FFXI. So camping ***doesn't bother me if we actually get to fight. But camping 3hrs to see Cannot attack, target already claimed. Is always irritating.

Limbus FTW, I've been doing that event since it's inception. Have everything aside from new jobs I take up AF+1 mats, and still love doing it (Except SW apollyon cause it's too goddamn short). Really, if I could point to one battle instance in the game to highlight how awesome FFXI can be, it's Northwest Apollyon (Kings). Just sucks that everyone gets Magenta chips from solo blms now... 6man full sweep = ftw+1

The Voidwalker system was also a pretty positive step. Low Drop rates don't really bug me as long as there is a guaranteed battle, but you're speaking to a man who farmed every weapon/armor/accessory/item in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, just because I wanted to see what the next monster had. I guess it was part of the exploration mechanic if you look at it from a three dimensional point of view.

Anyway, if you're here just for gear, do yourself, and everyone else a favor and just stop. Go pick up a wicked Single player game

make everything 100% drop, pop every 5 mins, and take 1 shot to kill. RMT problem solved

it also most likely has something to do with the fact that really and truly decking out a ffxi character with 100% bought gil(assuming a non-shady site) would run you between ten and fifteen thousand dollars, and at that point you generally throw up your hands and buy a car(or an account) instead

The best way to get rid of RMT is to have SE make gil untradeable and make it so you can't dbox gil at all.

Then also to make a constant price on everything in the AH so they couldn't buy your item for xmillion gil.

Harsh, but a small MMO I played in the late 90s had a better idea to get rid of trouble players.
- GM summons them to a very public place, with lots of people around. Think Lower Jeuno or Whitegate.
- GM announces to the entire server what they did, and what's about to happen.
- GM "revokes their protection." This means they were suddenly dressed in a criminal outfit to identify them, and players could kill them. And they'd drop their items/money just like if a monster killed them (which means you could take their stuff.) Lost experience, too.

Players would go rabid and chase the revoked person around until they logged off, trying to kill them and steal their stuff. If they hid for too long, the GM would just drag them back out somewhere in a crowd. After all was said and done, they'd be banned from the game.

So, you bought gil and geared yourself to be top tier. Suddenly you appear in Whitegate, a GM says "hey everybody, let's step out into Wajoam!" He then makes you killable, and when you die, about 10% of your carried gear/gil ends up in the treasure pool. And if you lay there as a corpse? They force-raise you so the players can do it again.

And again.

And again.

Sure, your character is ruined, but it would have been if you were banned anyway. However, the entire community just turned on you like animals and tore you limb from limb to get your stuff. Do you really want to stick around after that?

Get rid of RMT and everybody else.

Spiriel, is the game you're talking about called Realm? I remember a friend of mine explaining something like that years ago in that game.

this ^


if i got dragged out and thrown to the wolves like that, i'm pretty sure i'd D/C then and there rather than give them the pleasure of killing me for loot

Reason #12: There are 2+ billion Chinese, 1.2 billion of them are horny, frustrated men with nothing better to do.

China has banned the sale of virtual goods for real world currency almost a year ago. So a lot of people here shouting it's as easy as banning Chinese/Korean ISP's need to look into this.

Not saying that Chinese farming in all MMOs has stopped completely but it's hevily fined if they are cought. Making the business model too risky for most owners, They prefer reliable steady income. No use in taking that much of a gamble if they have no stake in the MMO business it's just a place to make money. The same people will open up a new business making cheap plastics or something else. Whatever brings them steady income.

You would be shocked by just how much gil is sold in mass to brokers by NA/JP players and linkshells.

I'm in agreement with everyone who says it's an issue directly involved to gameplay. If it wasn't worth it to buy gil people wouldn't do it. It's an inherent problem with our culture too though. I've even felt it myself. That I'm just doing things over and over in game to reach my reward of whatever piece of gear this is. It's not like when I first started playing and enjoyment came from doing/trying new things. Everyone wants the shortest path to the best gear, anything in the way is an annoyance.

Take for example the Lu Shang's rod. One of the most mind numbing and repetitive tasks in the game. After every update and mechanic to STOP rmt fishing. (The "new" catching system, fatigue, random stamina) At 200 fish a day. Taking an average of 1 fish per minute. That's 3 Hours and 20 minutes a day of fishing moat carp. @ 50 days of fishing to cap, that totals out to almost 7 days straight of fishing real world time over two months!

Minimum wage in my state is $7.25 an hour. that's about $1,196. (Most of us probly make even more than that. If you total that kind of time anywhere near $10 an hour that's about the price of a relic account) Coming from someone who has done "The Rivalry" (under the old system which was easier but still a pain in the ***) I wish I spent the $80 on gil, I've spent more than that just going out drinking for a night.

I don't have a side of the argument honestly. I can understand the aspect of a "legit" player who says "It's just a game, I shouldn't pay over my 12$ a month for items that have no tactile worth. People who pay for fake things are idiots" I can also understand the aspect of someone who works a lot. To them the investment of time just to get items/gear that some people/linkshells deem necessary to enjoy parts of the game, isn't worth as much as just paying a bit of cash.

Only job they can get.