RMT

I spent some time reading the comments about that article on mmorpg.com about RMT.

The first thing I remembered is the reason why I don't spend much time on these forums... And then I remembered over 10 years ago playing Magic: The Gathering... Some were able to buy very expensive (and overpowered) cards while I was playing with an elf deck and still had fun.

Not sure there's more to say beside that Magic has probably been a true gold mine for Wizards of the Coast since 1993...

I played SWG for about 2 years. At $15 per months, that makes $360 (and at some point I had 2 accounts so let's say a bit over $400). I have never spent that much money on Magic cards, even when the online version came out, and always had fun playing it. And then I know of more than 1 player that paid way more than $400 for a jedi account (and even non-jedi accounts).

So I'm not quite sure why some are thinking RMT is so new and that "the majority of players are against it". Seems like some thousands and thousands of players didn't mind spending way too much money into a cards game. What would make MMOs any different?

Surely there's better ways to handle this than others, very much like anything in life...

edit: One funny fact about my experience in SWG. I never could get the best weapons because I wasn't spending enough time going after the big loot and was always counting the few credits I had until a friend of mine quit the game and gave me all his stuff and money.

That day I bought some very powerful weapons that I was never able to buy before. So you could say that I gained "an unfair advantage that I didn't worked for" yet nobody complained about it.

If SWG would have been a free game with RMT, I could have spent the $400 I spent on subscription to buy directly these big guns and the results would have been the same in the end.

Anyway, I was still bad at combat with my big guns so I guess that's why people didn't bother about me getting free stuff.

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Injecting money in MMO

Most MMOs are using quests to push money into the world. As already stated before, there won't be quests in the game, at least not at first and surely no "kill 10 rats" quests. Whatever if it's good or not for some reason, that's not something I want.

I also don't want a system that could be used to get a player rich without any players' interaction. So what I'm looking for is a system that would just start the economy and help new players to get started.

So far, the main idea that keeps coming back to me is the "gold buyer NPC". Have some NPCs around the world that would pay a small amount to players for gold they mined. Even if the money given to players is ridiculously low, the obvious problem is that some players will still go through the process of grinding gold.

Gold is acquired by mining rocks that respawns after a "randomish" number of minutes that can be adjusted. When a rock is mined, a roll is made against a loot table to see if something has been found and what have been found. So while gold could be made hard to get, I'm under the impression it's still prone to abuse, without saying that it would somehow miss the point of helping new players to "easily" get started.

A maximum amount of gold that can be turned per day (or week) per character could be set but since registration is free, it's pointless. Players can just create a new character, get gold, get money and then tip it back to their main character. Mechanics to prevent more than 1 character per IP or such is out of question here. Not reliable enough and problematic for players playing from the same network.

I guess that in the following days I'll be looking at other games to see how they handle such matters. My feeling though is that the most reliable way is to put the players in situations where they have to spend at least X time so that money given is limited by the time spent playing and not by some formula or system.

If anyone can point me to some originals ways to inject money into the world, let me know. I'd also be interested to hear your ideas/suggestions.

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