Mystic Worlds dove headfirst into the Real Money Transfer (RMT) debate on February 6, and I wager some people are breathing a sigh of relief that “Sanctioned Real Money Trading” didn’t spark the blood feud witnessed a mere twenty months ago. Or the somewhat more civil but nonetheless passionate clash of wills occuring some time later [Fn1].
Well, breathe no longer.
I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to back up an unsubstantiated claim I made in a comment on the aforementioned post.
Saylah: I found it VERY interesting to see an MMO with legal and illegal RMT-like activity while sustaining a robust and active player driven economy. The nay-sayers should think again.
AT: It’s an MMO with 200,000 players on a single server. The sheer size of the economy means it is barely affected by such small-scale RMT. In a sharded game, with perhaps a a tenth or less of that population per shard and much easier ways to farm currency, illegal RMT can have an ENORMOUS impact on the economy.
In the course of rummaging around for an EVE Online developer quote I am sure would serve as a witness for the defense, so to speak, I found myself developing a very strong opinion on RMT. More on that later, because I did eventually find the quote, which was buried in the middle of a Fanfest 2007 taped question-and-answer session. After being asked how great an effect the timecode-for-ISK system was having on the economy, CCP’s resident PhD. in Economics Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson answered:
(After establishing that a number of the audience had indeed bought ISK) …It really comes down to curbing the demand, and the demand has been relatively low. So it’s not impacting the game as such.
While this seems too simplistic an answer to a wide variety of concerns, not the least of which being the equity or uprightness of such a system, the good doctor did make clear that the developers weren’t sacrificing the integrity of the market to make a quick króna [Fn2]. Besides that, there exist two key mechanics in EVE’s basic design that mitigate the tremendous fallout one normally associates with large-scale illegal (or sanctioned) RMT.
First is the market system’s realism; there is a real population – 200,000 players – whose players are separated by vast distances that goods cannot instantly traverse. Any sudden influx of currency from an unnatural source is quite naturally absorbed. The free market, which sees hundreds of billions of ISK in transactions across the galaxy on a slow day, simply will not be fazed by the few stray billion changing hands occasionally.
The skill system also represents a mechanic that mitigates the effect of RMT on EVE. No matter how much money a given player has in his wallet, he will still take four years or longer to get to where, in terms of progression, the oldest players are now. Even then the veterans will maintain their lead.
The price of a veteran character, which is only payable with ISK, is prohibitively high to the point where only people who have been playing the game for months or years could afford one anyway; because of the nature of 0.0 space, veteran players can actually make far more money than a slant eye farmer over any given time period. The only way around this is to pay huge sums of Real Life money for the ISK charged for a veteran character. That it is so time-consuming to create powerful characters in the first place also severely limits their supply compared to level- and gear-based MMOs.
At last I arrive at the point, hoping that I have followed a logical progression of reasoning up until now. EVE is uniquely capable among MMOs of having Real Money Transfer and traditional advancement/gain coexist peacefully. A level-based game, or a sharded into small servers, or even one with instantaneous transfer of goods across a large world, could not come close to accomplishing the same thing. So Blizzard, SOE, Funcom, EA/Mythic – keep your moneygrubbing paws out of the honey pot [Fn3].
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Fn1. There really was no graceful way to do that.
Fn2. The Icelandic króna is abbreviated “ISK,” but it in this context it could easily be confused with EVE’s Interstellar Kredit.
Fn3. Which has money in it. Not honey.
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