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Real Money Inside in MMORPGs?
Cranial writes "Sony Interactive expressly forbids the selling of Everqest or Everquest II ingame items or characters for money, but why? Imagine Massively Multiplayer Games where you can actually cash out your loot in the real world.
What if that jewel in the dragon hoard was actually a digital title for the Hope Diamond or a real ancient artifact?
This article on Programmers Heaven proposes a new economic model for MM games allowing free exchange of game money and items in the real world. Essentially it is a hybridization between online gaming (casino) and MM roleplaying games. Fascinating concept."
Ah ha! I can trade in all my equipment for a used coffee cup!
Has any MMORGP gone totally without duping problems? Not to my knowledge. Star Wars has only been out a month, and already had some (small) dupe bugs.
When that happens....maybe.
A modern day witchhunt.
There.com has a somewhat similar concept. While not strictly an MMORPG, they do allow for the conversion of Dollars into ThereBucks.
Or at least they used to when I played the beta months ago before they started spamming my inbox.
But when Blizzard first came out with Diablo 2 Expansion, I was one of those ppl that exploited an easy level-up opportunity..
which allowed me to get to level 95 in 4 days.. after that, I went all-item hunting, and just picking up tons of stuff, muling and all...
and.. sold most of it immediately on ebay.. since it was the only way to do it before cheating/duping and all those things happen, while items were actually worth money, I made about 500$, more than my money back!
ya.. supply and demand is cool, too bad Sony's soo against it..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
Because this is what roleplaying is all about. Loot.
There (www.there.com) is already kinda doing this. You can use your credit card to buy ThereBucks at like $1.00 == ~$T1030.00. In addition to this you can create products - clothing, cars ect that you can sell and make more ThereBucks.
With ThereBucks you can buy transportation things (buggys, hoverboards) and all sorts of clothing - Some of which is created by There and a lot is created by There users. Theres even an auction system.
Its pretty sweet.
/* Lobster Stick To Magnet!*/
Although this seems like a "new-economy" idea, I can't say I'm a big fan. Firstly, gambling is 21+ and restricted to certain zones. Secondly, this promotes very anti-social behavior--people crouching away at their computers, beating wombat after wombat to get the extra gold and items. It takes the *fun* out of the game, as well as the *realism*. RPG stand for role-playing-game, and if all you're doing is leaching off of this world to try and make the most bucks you can as your primary form of employment, you may be compromising the fun of the game for other casual gamers.
stops becomming a game, and become employment. And all that implies.
You will also lose in revenue from people who want to play for fun. because they will never get an opportunity to get 'valauable items'
what happens when you spen 20 hourse getting a real valuable item, then the company decided to put 1000 od them in the game the next day? How valauble is something that can be created infinite times?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A dupe bug would bring the economics of such a system crashing down.
The advantage to a system where in-game objects don't have (recognized) real value is that bugs aren't lethal to the parent company, and the game can be revised and the game database directly edited with impunity.
Make money in the game real, and suddenly the parent company has to be a lot more careful, and is a lot more liable if things go wrong (as actual damage has provably occurred to the players).
Project Entropia already do this.
As is people don't already have enough of an excuse to hack characters and grief other players anyway. Now they want to add additional incentives to do so.
I don't think I'd want to play in a game world that activly encouraged that.
This is a great idea but it brings up a host of new problems. Who owns online items? What legal recourse is there if someone cheats? Who is liable for your money. etc.
People spend so much time and effort on MMORPGs that they should allow people to actually make a little money.
I think the problem here is liability. If a software glitch caused objects to vanish, or improvements to the game shifted the balance and (inadvertedly) change the value of items, people would suddenly lose real money, and might sue.
I wonder how well an MMPORG would work as a tax shelter? Instead of getting money in the real world, you just get it dumped straight into your "Everquest IV: The IRS Has No Power Here" account. And if people would claim loss of game currency on as an itemized deduction.
Of course, sales taxes would be a pain in the ass. "Sorry, I'm not paying CA sales tax when I'm obviously performing this transaction in Midgaard." And if someone beats your character's sorry ass and takes your money, you'd have a hell of a time convincing the cops to track down one Umbrak the Barbarian, 8.7 feet tall, green skin, no hair, weight about 430 pounds, wielding a large spiked club and resistant to cold spells.
This just doesn't sound like a good idea.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
for $2. Any takers?
word.
> you can put money in the system to get game money, or take game money out of the system as real money. Its been around for a while.
Yep, it's a very old idea, commonly known as "the stock market".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Except that NOBODY needs diablo II weapons and armor to survive. All he did was make a profit by selling to morons. Nothing wrong with that, nobody made them buy his stuff, they obviously wanted it enough to pay for it. That is how economics works.
I'm kinda assuming you wrote that post as a joke, but in case you didn't....
Finkployd
I don't understand what you mean "other people's problems".. I actually started each item at 1 dollar, and let the market decide how much it was worth, and I literally sold everything..
I might have been vague on what I meant by "exploit".. I don't mean cheating the server or anything, it's just that when the expansion just came out, anyone that plays it knows that one of the area "Bloody Hill" was insanely stupid - if you were a sorcerer, you literally can kill everything without being touched the way the level was designed - it was an design error which I think on the later patches, they made it harder..
and I just happened to ride on that design mistake - I didn't use any programs to "exploit" anything.. so maybe my choice of words weren't that accurate.. unlike the dupers and hackers and what not...
I don't take anything away from anybody - I didn't force anyone to bid on my stuff on ebay or anything.. if someone values an item at 20$, then I will sell it to them..
If you meant that as that I didn't make the game, well, I did invest tons of time on it, and I guess it's just different opinions.. then I'll just agree to disagree..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
The idea of linking Real World(tm) money to MMORPG ingame money is exactly what Project Entropia is all about. You start out with the bare minimum of clothes, tools and skills and are only able to upgrade and buy stuff with in game money, which you don't have yet. To get money in the game you have two options:
1) Exchange real money for ingame money
2) Make money in the game by performing services, selling items, doing stuff, trading, gambling...
The most novel aspect of the game is that it allows you to exchange ingame money back into real money too.
Some things to note about this game is that stuff deteriorates, so over time without updating your items they would lose their monetary value.
What I liked about the idea is that for a certain amount of real money you can buy yourself the skills and tools to keep you busy for a certain amount of time. Then when you want to continue playing you have to either put in an enormous effort to make money in the game, or simply add some more real money. You are paying for playing. Not sure if it is very well balanced in Project Entropia, but the idea is interesting.
Less well off geeks who spend lots of time building characters up will sell to a high bidder who has money in real life and therefore the new owner of the character/item will not know how to use it as well as the geek who spent months getting it.
The game will end up with a bunch of more wealthy less experienced people running the lives of the geeks who spent all their time aquiring the items. The FUN of these games is that ANYONE regardless of status in the REAL world can become someone great. If money from the real world gets involved, that destroys the fantasy because not everyone will be on an equal footing when they start out.
That is one of the big reasons I think these games are so much fun.
Anyone ever had the misfortune to actually run any sort of online gaming environment?
Ever had to deal with the piles of complaints from 12 year olds upset that they lost something of no real-life value?
And you want now give them things WITH real life value they can complain about losing?
Gee, I wonder why the gaming companies aren't signing up for that.
paintball
The theorem used here is trying to create an entire society, not just a profitable MMORPG.
If you even begin to attempt to do something of this magnitude, the first lawsuit will be the end of it.
Or the first death. Don't think someone won't track another user and kill his punk ass because he stole his deed to some ruby in Nebraska.
Put simply, we don't have the computing capacity, or bandwidth, or security to support this system. These are the kinds of games that movies are based on, and parody. Someone could potentially spend years of their life in a game like this, doing whatever they please. Running a farm, running a shop, whatever.
This is just not possible at the moment. The graphics aren't good enough, the bandwidth isn't there (think of a New York sized metropolitan area--and the massive lag associated with it).
Of course it's a good idea. A virtual society with real money and real consequences, hell, before you know it you'll have mini-governments out there, plus the added intrigue of bounty hunters who go find the bastard that killed your cousin's character and stole all his loot.
You'll vote on the president of a virtual world or continent or server or however you want to specify it. Of course, for this truly to work, it would be game-wide, and that kind of operation would require millions of people to use it to create a revenue stream good enough to make it viable.
Yes, that gold site isn't a "currency" but you damn well better believe the first time a 10 year old earns $10k off of something there would be law quicker than you can say Cease and Decist.
There are too many variables, too much shit that goes along with this kind of idea to make it never get beyond what it already is: a child's perfect dream world, with no corruption or inflation, with no abuse or discourse.
Keep hope alive, but don't even imagine this coming into existence in the next 10 years.
It reminds me of Molyneux's new game, The Movies. He pontificates on the viability of creating all of the "main parts" of your favorite movies with the game. Including Star Wars or Terminator or Fried Green Tomatoes. And you just know it's going to be a lame console game with a PC version that is probably above average. He dreams big, but he hasn't hit the mark in a long time. Black and White's UI-less UI was limp, but he tried.
And its ideas like this that are required for a true cyberspace to come into being.
Good luck.
1) Taxation on profits. If people were making a living in this virtual world, the tax collectors would want their take. Just like casinos, the game companies would end up with some responsibility for collecting witholding for states, federal, and maybe even foreign countries. And just like casinos, they would probably need to somehow allow players to track losses as well for tax purposes. This is complicated by the fact that most of what is going on can easily be disguised with "gifts", "barter" transactions, with cash being exchanged on the side.
2) If a bug "poofs" a valuable item, and they support the idea that the item can have a real cash value, then they just became liable for the loss. Same with dupe bugs as has already been mentioned. The same idea would apply to "fraudulent" trades made by players, making the game company potentially liable for the players' loss.
3) Suspending or banning a player could potentially lead to a lawsuit based on loss of income, and the game company might have to prove to a court that the suspension/banning was justified, almost like an employment related lawsuit.
4) Can you say money laundering? Think a game company wants their name on that?
5) Any change to the game that affected the economy (which would probably be most of them) could end up screwing certain players. If you thought of the items and virtual money as stocks and real cash, the game company basically has the power to screw prices however they want. If they're officially supporting these cash equivalents, they would most likely be accused of corruption on a daily basis.
The list could go on, I think you get the idea. I'm sure companies will continue to try this idea, but as someone already mentioned, the other effect is that if a significant number of people are in it for the money, it will basically suck most of the fun out of the game for the people who are "just playing", and the whole model would likely collapse because no one would play so the economy would never get off the ground (basically you'd have a big lack of consumers).
By *not* supporting it officially and at least discouraging the idea if not strictly policing it, I think it actually can "work" better, because the company shifts all the liability to the players, and minimizes the effect of it on the game so that players don't feel like they're surrounded by ripoff artists.
As usual for a /. poster, IANAL, but I thought the US had laws stating the federal government is the sole issuer of legal tender within its borders. Naturally, people can barter whatever they want (which is really all currency is a proxy for), but whoever is running the exchange could run into some legal issues. For example, would the company running the MMORPG be considered a bank under US law and have to follow all the accompanying restrictions? Basically, by insisting that nothing in the game has any equivalent to real property, game operators avoid a massive list of potential legal issues. This proposal would seem to wade -- hell, belly-flop -- into those issues headfirst.
it was a text-only mud my freshman year of college: ..
you are in room with a dirt floor. you see:
life
> get life
Connection closed by foreign host.
%
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Deja Vu. Back in the May 1985 issue of Dragon Magazine, I published a story Catacomb where the main character was trying to raise cash by playing a mulit-user dungeon crawling game. I often wondered why on-line gambling went with casino games instead of following the D&D model.
Even with duping most online economies are very stable (although I haven't seen many duping problems in EQ).
The real problem is the law. If The EQ pp is given a dollar value, then "real-world" legal issues come into play. I could definitly imagine a case where an expensive item drops (EQ fungi tunic sells for about $195) and there is a law suit because someone unfairly looted the item.
There is also gambling in EQ. If I can go buy pp, gamble, and cash in my winnings (presuming I win), then EQ becomes a casino.
These are all legal issues that sony can avoid by making sales of items illegal.
. If money from the real world gets involved, that destroys the fantasy
I agree, games are a fantasy, an escape from the day to day pressures of reality. If I wanted to see people lie to get money, cheat to get money, choose profit over human compassion etc. then all I need to do is....um, go out the front door.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
I don't think that betting had anything to do with the popularity of baseball (unless you are Pete Rose). When I was a kid, going to a double-header with the family was a relatively cheap form of entertainment. You brought a bag of sandwiches, cokes, and peanuts, paid a buck or two per person, and had a nice afternoon.
Now the games are ridiculously expensive and you have to shell out lots of $$$ to buy outrageously overpriced ballpark food. A generation of kids has grown up that probably never experience a ballgame, so they could care less which team wins.