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MMOG Economies Examined
Overanalyzed.com has an interesting (short) piece up on the Economy of World of Warcraft, discussing the way that goods and money flow into and out of player's hands. Commentary is available at Terra Nova. From the article: "Let me preface this by saying that I personally approach MMOs in a different way than most people. While most play for personal enjoyment, I come to them looking to make money. Obviously, while I do still enjoy the time I spend playing the games, I'm much more interested in crossing the boundary and selling my expertise and services in game for real life money."
You agree to a certain number of very specific rules in order to play games like this. One is no selling of in game stuff for real money. If you violate this rule they can and will ban you very quickly. He doesn't have to play the game if he doesn't want to, and it is not designed to provide a source of income to the player.
The player does NOT own their character. They are basically renting space and time from the blizzard servers for the benefit of entertaining themselves. Thats basically all it boils down to. At any time in the contract Blizzard may ban the user and terminate the user paying Blizzard. The user really can't do anything except open a new account.
Lastly, there have been a number of informative posts in games.slashdot over the last month or two describing what what effect the "gil sellers" in FF have had - camping items 24/7 basically monopolising level advancement to a certain point in the game. Fuck that.
See, this is why Final Fantasy XI sucked. Because people blaimed a fundamental problem with the game on the gilsellers, instead of on the developers, where it belonged.
The problem was never the gilsellers, it was always the ability to monopolize resources. People have asked Square-Enix about this, and the response has always been the same: monopolizing resources is 100% OK with them. But selling items for real money is not.
The proper solution would be for Square-Enix to prevent people from monopolizing resources, either by making it impossible to monopolize them (you can only access them x times in y hours) or by making them available to all (such as with instances, which FFXI does implement - often refered to as "BCNMs").
It is true that Square-Enix has finally begun addressing this root problem - the monopolizing of resources. They are doing things to increase the ways that money leaves the system (the "AH Tax"), and adding more items that are obtained via instances that are functionally equivilent to items that had previously been monopolized.
Unfortunately it still is considered "fair play" by the developers to completely monopolize limited resources 24/7. So the problems people have with gilsellers do, for the most part, still exist.
Blizzard should be making the money from the transfers, not ebay, ebayers etc. Then they would have to charge a subscription. That's what RedBedlam's doing with Roma Victor
From the WoW EULA "You may not exploit World of Warcraft for any commercial purpose".
It's not rocket science, DON'T DO IT, and don't encorage or tacitly condone it with articles like this. What next, posts from lusers along the lines of 'I keep trying to steal from my work but I find it's not profitable' and hints on 'How to get rich stealing office supplies'?
Contrary to what this luser is claming, Blizzard have said NOT to do it from the outset (and do note, this guy WAS selling things on eBay, this is NOT just 'research into economic theory'). To quote from his web site "Some of you may know at one time I tried my hand as a professional day-trader." - a day trader, GTG, does his greed and stupidity know no bounds?
He appears to be a useless article that's unable to find a job that he enjoys and that pays reasonbly well and that actually contributes something to society. Apparently unable to compete in a legitimate market (e.g. in a game like Entropy or There.com where it's perfectly acceptible to sell virtual items for real world money) he's left trying to eek out a living by illegally selling items in other games under the counter, with no regard for the cost to others of his own actions.
I would note that you can easily obtain information about the real world value of a curreny from eBay and the various sites that also illicitly sell in game currency.
There is some interesting information in the article but the truth is you don't need to actually break a legally binding contract (which is exactly what this guy has done) in order to do this level of research.
What's laughable is it's not even in depth nor even that accurate. He states 'I personally believe that the next big thing in MMOs will be tighter integration of real-life cash with in-game property. Game like Second Life, Roma Victor, and Project Entropia are just a few that are paving the way.And while each has significant flaws, I believe the first to get it right (or more realistically, right enough) will be the first to break into the mass market.'. Good Fucking Greif - if that's likely, why then has WoW (which has taken the hardest line yet of any recent MMO on the enforcing it's ban on reselling) just spanked their subscription figures into the next decade?
People don't want micropayments for items in a fantasy game, most people don't want to be constantly reminded of their already huge credit card bill and people are already tetchy enough about spending money on subscribing to games as it is (just look at the gap Guild Wars has been made to fill).
While I do there still exists an excellent oppertunity for a Virtual World that isn't a badly implimented pile of crap (like Second Life of there.com - both of which are stunnlingly retarded and apparently written by someone who's never written any software for humans, just in case you've not tried either of them) and that in such an environment I think you could conceiveably have micropayment system, that sort of system is more social activity (where most of the goods being bought are mere 'virtual bling' and the rest unlock specific features and sub games for a given length of time) and is a very distinct from a fantasy game people play to have fun in (like WoW or CoH) where the items themselves are tools (and rewards) for fun, not usually 'fun' in themselves.
In fantasy games (from SWG to WoW to L2) items such as weapons and armour represent something very different. They represent dedication to the game and a certain level of knowledge of, and achivement within the framework of the game , as opposed to say to there.com which is for virtual Chavs with little money but who like to spend what they do have on virtual clothing and bling to make people think they are not the hoop-earring wearing, council house dwelling virtual chavscum they so clearly are.
In short, it's clear people don't want to play fantasy games and pay for items in them with real world money. They have made that patently clear, it's mind boggling that the evidence for this seems to have eluded some people.