The Great Debate 3: FFXI Has Benefited From Having RMT

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The topic:
While RMT tells and account hacks are quite prevalent at the moment, the fact is RMT would not be in an MMORPG if there was not money to be made, meaning people are using their services.
"FFXI has benefited from having Real Money Trading (RMT)"

Keep gilbuying or accusations out of this thread, we all know it happens and calling someone something does not enhance the debate discussion

This topic is alot less political and alot more mind numbing then the last.

How so?

Imo, I mean not really, I don't see people specifically starting to play due to the fact we have RMT available, it might keep some playing, but it drives an equal amount of people away I guess.

So I'd say no and yes, IF ANYTHING it hurt FFXI.

Edit**

What I am saying is purely just on Gill Buying/Selling, not the RMT players and what they do.

FFXI has not benifited from having an outside source control its economy and make level 75 noobs.

How can it have been benifited, give me one good example.

People in RL make money...that all I can think of.

Edited topic to: "FFXI has benefited from having Real Money Trading (RMT)"
To encompass all forms.

But it hasn't Karusan.

You think it does, so give us an example to debate about, otherwise you make a lousy moderator.

Ludoggy has quit his real life job and now leveles up and sells characters in ffxi for money.
FIGHT!

I'll post eventually. Prove to me it hasn't, that's the idea of the topic. People have made the comments that these debates are more about this is someones opinion and less about the actual topic itself.

Only if you give me porn to fap off of.

uh. it is impossible for the game "fFXI" itsself to BENIFIT from rmt. however players are the only people who have pros and cons toward rmt.

and for the person who said something about rmt bring in the lvl 75 bums. guess u havent seen carbuncle.. so many bums who havent rmt, are 75, and dunno ***.

i mean its ok to be a bum.. ***my towngear set makes even me look like a bum (lol inside joke) but yeah... people are STILL struggling at this dying game and its pretty much dead... but rmt will always exsist as long as there are people with too much money and not enuff intelligence..

I don't think any positive economic impact is worth gilsellers hacking accounts and stealing from players... I have no numbers to support my argument but many people I know who have been hacked have quit right then and there. Granted RMT is nowhere near as bad as it was I myself have made the mistake of buying an item that was price fixed only to try to sell it later at a huge loss.

Even if the ability for lazy people to succeed ingame by buying currency helped boost a few accounts and make these people play longer and keep being a paying customer I doubt this would positively effect the economy. For one thing many people who buy gil have no respect for fair values. They buy and sell things haphazardly often hurting the other players who then buy or sell that same product. The ability to buy gil inflates costs and makes it harder for people who do it fairly. This creates even more stress on players because they feel they can't afford the gear they need to play their job. The only advantage I can think of about RMT is consumables and cheap crafted items are available all the time. These items that RMT sell are undercut so far that normal legit players can't make money farming/crafting that item. But this is a balanced advantage, every bit of good that you get out of it the same loss is seen for the other side of the spectrum.

A) RMT destroys the economy. If it wasn't for RMT trying to get as much gil as possible to sell it to players who have to buy their way into good gear, then we would all be happy. RMT makes prices skyrocket by doing the following: Pricegouge, Camping NMs and botting them just for the sake of selling the R/E items and/or selling the highly sought after item (before SE fixed that), Buying a lot of 1 item then moving to another server to sell them at double the price (i.e. Witch Sash on Asura), Undercut crafters on a good piece of equipment (i.e. Sniper's Ring/Snow Ring on Asura, they went from 400k to 50k thanks to some RMTs) then when there is nobody to craft the items anymore, they resell the product at 4x-10x its "current price."

B) RMTs encourage botting. The biggest RMT shell on Asura is 24/7. They have to NASA their NMs to get the items. Usually, some MNK or so wants to upgrade to Black Belt, or some gimppy DRK wants to buy Adaman Harberk Abj, so they pay 1-5 million gil or so JUST for that one item to 24/7. They then go and resell it to the Chinese RMT just to help pay for their NASA bot that they bought 3 times now at least. If RMTs never existed, those who would want to put the gear to good use would be able to without having to save for a month just to buy 1 item.

C) RMTs destroy's player faith towards Square Enix. Like I said, 24/7 is the biggest RMT shell on Asura. Every time I see them holding a NM, or claiming a NM from the other side of the zone, I call a GM on them. And every time I do so, giving them PROOF that they botted, I still see those same characters continue to thrive because SE can't really do anything to them about it. Sure, some characters do get banned, but they just rebuy accounts over and over again because its so profitable for them. They need to take the hint and delete their characters once and for all because, while they make a low profit margin, nobody is going to take them after the shell finally gets the big disband cause of poor leadership, and those who were in that shell will have to change servers and name just to start over again.

This enough reason why I think RMTs have not benefited FFXI?

I could mention that RMTs also cause people to leave because of their blantant cheating and hacking into other's accounts, but I think I'll leave that to Ludoggy to say.

I would not state that FFXI has benefited from having RMT but I think that SE might have benefited from having RMT. But I would not think they benefited that much.

It's hard to tell though... would need to know how many people left the game because of RMT(I'm sure not that many) VS the amount of people who did stay longer because they can play the way they want if they can buy gils.

I think they made more money with the ppl who are staying in game because they can buy gil. Now you'd need to know how much money they made with the people staying or playing because they can buy gil and subtract the money they spent on paychecks for their anti-rmt team and additional GM. If the amount is not in the minus, you got a winner. On top of that you might even need to think about if they made money or not(if they did it must be really low) producing and selling the security token.

You should talk to me for that :p Got 600GB of pr0n sleeping on my HDDs :]
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Now on the topic, well that question is kinda stupid, I'd like to know how any game can benefit from RMT ? SE made money from these RMT account for sure yeah, how does that help FF XI ? SE making more money doesn't mean that money will be automatically re-invested into FF XI.

I would not say that FFXI has benefitted from RMT, but people who sell/buy accounts/gil certainly have.

/attack

It depends on how you look at the situation. Had RMT never been introduced to the game environment, FFXI would be a lot better off. This is an undeniable Fact. I started playing before the huge boom in RMT. When 1million gil was upwards of 100$USD (there was only one RMT group on Odin, and they farmed Gigas exclusively). Even in this situation, I managed to farm a Haubergeon at level 60. Granted, I was probably the quintessence of loldrk up until then, but after that Point, I was one of the most highly sought after lolmelee's on the Odin server (With others like Zeroz and other old old school Dark Knights). Of course, this was when Ranger was unstoppable, so "The most highly sought after lolmelee" is just that, still lolmelee. While RMT existed, as did hacks and cheats, I am a perfect example that you need anything, not even the FFXI windower to function in the world of FFXI.

With all that Said, there are a few positive influences RMT have had on the game. The most recent one I can remember is the Mistletoe fiasco. RMT were crafting remedies to sell, but in the process, they were making legitimate players rich, myself as one of them (Often pulling in 2 or 3m a week farming 4 hours a day). while at the same time, creating gil on the servers.

Overall though, RMT has provided a net loss for Final Fantasy XI.

I'll try to play devil's advocate a little bit. It's late and I'm sleepy, so i may post later when i've thought it out more.

From what i admit is only casual conversation with a lot of players, they LIKED the inflation that gil buying brought in 05-06. They say it is much, much harder to make gil now. With RMT injecting "artificial" gil into the economy, square's naturally brutal economy was softened. gilbuyers would pay large amounts of bought gil for things like scorpion harnesses, and crafters could make their e-livings or even get rich. With the near-eradication of RMT, crafting is, by the accounts i've heard at least, a money pit, at least compared with what it used to be.

It may also be worth noting that the recent rash of account hijackings and hackings is widely rumored to be a desperation move by RMT's who can't get gil any other way. It might be easier for the community at large to just let them do their thing peacefully. Maybe not, but, eh, devil's advocate. it won't be any fun if someone doesn't take the opposite position.

The economy in ffxi is fairly harsh for new players with no idea how to make gil. I'll wager that there were quite a few players who bought gil a few times, and, as they learned how the game works, learned to make money and became legitimate players. I know that the prevailing attitude seems to be, "Well, we don't need gil-buying scum like that in our game." Me, I'll take any new players i can get. I personally believe that ffxi is going to go down to the wire once 14 is released, and I'll take every 12.95 per month paying customer i can get to forestall the day the servers shut down, whether i like them personally or not.

Inflation sucked.
Why do I say this? Well a few weeks ago I compared to a commonly farmed item (bee chips) to a highly wanted item (SH) well...it turned out the amount of stacks of chips you needed to afford a SH back during the inflation was about 16x stacks compared to 4x stacks today.

Making some players richer cannot be called a positive influence since the majority was suffering from the inflation at the same time. Question is about FF XI "in general" not about couple players who made money thanks to RMT :p



Definitely impossible to compare using the same item, since new stuff been releasing since then. And people been spending gils elsewhere. People just lost interest in SH compared to before. Exactly how like sky items worth nothing now and used to worth a lot before. Take something like relics (so dynamis currency), they're more expensive today than before. (if you consider purchase power parity).

If it adds anything to the debate, I can relate the state of the gaming industry at the moment.

Monolithic AAA MMO's which do not have any form of RMT are seen as a dying breed. That is, games which derive a majority of their "fun" from the acquisition of items and experience, and which are closed systems whereby the only currency is time investment. (FFXI, for example.) Ruthless cost/benefit analysis has shown a few things about these types of games:

1) The market is not growing as fast as budgets. The same subset of people tends to play these games, and in order to get their business, you have to basically create the same game over and over again, but with progressively larger and larger budgets. This means companies are making progressively less and less profit margin on what is otherwise a pretty static player base. As an example, it is not unheard of for these games to now have development and infrastructure costs on the order of a quarter billion dollars, which is difficult to make back on $10/month subscriptions when a significant chunk of each account is going to pay for ongoing bandwidth and hosting fees.

2) The players of these games tend to be very content and service-intensive. They take their in-game prowess very seriously and occupy a huge amount of development time tweaking, balancing, retweaking, and arguing about skills, items, classes, etc. Regardless of how attentive the devs are to player needs, or how good the customer service is, these players are never happy. The tendency for them to continually badmouth the devs at every opportunity makes the games unenjoyable to work on and maintain. The best designers and coders in the industry are rapidly abandoning ship to more rewarding and enjoyable ventures.

3) Right now, the largest non-RMT approved game is World of Warcraft with approximately 10M subscribers. That sounds like a lot, but as I type this, more than 270M people around the world are playing non-traditional RMT-approved games and virtual worlds. (And paying just as much through microtransactions and other methods.) Furthermore, these more casual non-traditional games have development budgets that are frequently 1/10th to 1/100th the cost of a modern AAA MMO.

4) This number continues to increase at the rate of almost 20,000,000 per year, whereas the market for WoW/FFXI-style traditional MMO's has remained virtually flat for the past several years and shows serious signs of market saturation.

5) Combating RMT is expensive and questionably effective. There is no way to code to prevent it, and because RMT operations now make up approximately .03-.05% of mainland China's entire gross domestic product, you can count on someone in a country of a billion+ people to find ways around any block or filter. This need for ongoing policing and the PR nightmare around fighting the RMT is extremely expensive, cutting even more into development budgets and company profits. If you don't combat it aggressively enough, people quit. If you combat it too aggressively, people quit. It's lose-lose.

6) When companies are the ones providing microtransactions or RMT, they can always undercut the 3rd party illegal suppliers. This instantly dries up the market, stabilizing in-game economies, and resulting in better gameplay experiences for all users.

7) MMO's can do quite well and cater to both RMT, and non-RMT players alike, if they are designed from the ground up with that in mind. (Which FFXI was not.) As an example, EVE Online provides sanctioned methods to RMT that do not significantly effect gameplay and continue to grow their market share. Korean MMO's (the largest of which easily rival WoW in size) have provided company-sanctioned microtransaction models for almost a decade now, with no major backlash.

Will it matter with FF14? Probably not. The Japanese lead designer has already stated that he intends for FF14 to be a "hardcore MMO" that demands just as much time (possibly more) to play than FF11. So it seems SE is headed down the opposite path.

Make no mistake, however -- RMT is the wave of the future, according to just about every major game studio still left that hasn't folded into bankruptcy yet.

2 items is far, far too small of a sample size to determine much of anything.

Awesome, well thought out post from Jaerik, btw, far more interesting then the mindless, reflexive RMT IS TEH DEVIL LOL roar you hear from the herd every time one of these topics is introduced.

Edit: I definitely don't follow your math, Ludoggy. Beehive chips are 5k per stack on my server. Our last SH went for 120k. That's 20 stacks of beehive chips required to get a Scorpion Harness today, a far cry from 4.

Its really a 120+ billion $ industry? <.>

Wow, I fail at percentages when typing quickly. That, times .01 >< Fixed now, sorry.

Global sales of non-approved RMT transactions were estimated at slightly over $2 billion for 2007. There was many times that in "official" sanctioned RMT/microtransaction revenue. This number is growing exponentially and is estimated to be more like $3B by now.

By comparison, FFXI hasn't released subscriber numbers since late 2005, (when it was at 500k and falling), but best estimates (completely out of my ***) are around 175k-200k subscribers if you extrapolate out by natural MMO life cycle. FFXI has certainly not increased in subscribers since that time (or they would have released the numbers), and that's about the usual fall-off rate for MMO's of this age.

At $12/month, that's only $28.8M/year. (Or roughly 1.44% what RMT made in 2007). Some chunk of that is eaten up by bandwidth and infrastructure overhead. There are also outsourcing bills to pay for your customer service, etc.

Of the remainder, given the average game dev makes $79k/year, and you're siphoning off a huge chunk of that to support other dev teams... you can't keep a very big team around on the money that's left.

People seem to think SE is swimming in money with FFXI, and they really aren't by comparison. You can see why industry execs are starting to eye bigger game.

IGE themselves speaking about a $7bn market in the years to come.

As for the 170M players of F2P games with item shop or such (I suppose you're referring to these), lot of players do not spend a single $ on these. You can't say that 170M players = 170M customers. Some will spend a lot (more than a classic $13~15 monthly fee (the $10/month era is over)), but that's only a little proportion of total players. In average, numbers I read were 10~15% for Korea, 5% for the rest of the world.

So yeah having 10M subscriber is nice, if only 5% of them pays for the game (use the item shop, buys currency etc.), then you're back to 500K customers. Lot of F2P w/ item shop failed because they didn't have enough players.

(Also I think that your 170M players is inaccurate, it's way more than that. Knowing Habbo Hotel and Maply Story together got 156 millions players.)

Now I'm sad... It did look like it was going the other way.

That's true. 175M seemed low to me as well, but numbers are pretty crazily haphazard depending on who you ask. This site is one of the more trustworthy ones, and it says 186M. But it also says microtransactions on those users was over $1B. Yes, that's not $12/month per user or anything approaching that, but it's a lot more than FFXI ever pulled in, even at its peak.

The problem with Habbo and Maple is that they count everyone who ever registers as a "user." Same with worlds like Second Life. That tends to result in a very inaccurate number, as only a small percentage of users actually "stick."

If that's true...SE can take XIV and stick it Squarely where the sun doesn't shine. I had considered playing XIV if it wasn't near as big of a time sink as XI, but if it is....TO won't be there.