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A Case Study of RMTs In EVE Online
Kheldon writes with an article at MMO Gamer which explores how well real money transactions work in online games, using EVE Online as a test case. Quoting:
"... My next problem came from trying to sell the [Game Time cards] through the 'Time Code Bazaar' on the forums. While I quickly found buyers, none of them actually went through with the deal. This is the inherent problem with developer sanctioned RMT. Unless true, unfettered, player-to-player transactions are allowed without developer 'regulation,' the market will inevitably be operating inefficiently. Consider gold-farmers for a moment. Setting aside the moral or legal aspects of the trade, and considering from a purely economic standpoint, gold-farmers are the RMT equivalent of large corporations. They operate on the concept of 'economies-of-scale,' which basically means that up to a certain point, the larger a company is, the cheaper they can produce that product. Of course, companies that can produce a product more cheaply can undercut the competition while maintaining the same profit margin; meaning they'll make more sales, giving them more overall profit, and supporting the corporate growth, which furthers the economy of scale. This is the market at its most pure."
In addition to this, one does not need to wait for a physical card to arrive in the post or even buy directly from CCP. There are authorised sellers of electronic GTCs which are delivered instantly by email with no extra costs. I find the article to be very poorly researched - two mouse-clicks from the EVE website takes you to the list of official resellers.
Ehmmm, not really. Let's do a case by case comparison with player A and player B.
Scenario 1:
Player A pays his subscription the regular way and spends the month earning 1 billion isk.
Player B pays his subscription the regular way and spends the month earning 200 million isk.
Scenario 2:
Player B pays his own subscription the regular way and buys a gametime card with real life money.
Player A, being very good at making isk, buys the gametime card from player B for a sum of ingame money.
End result of both scenarios is the same. CCP has received the real life money for 2 subscriptions, and the actual amount of isk(ingame money) has not changed. Ergo, no inflation has taken place.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
"The other major problem is that there is no sanctioned way to convert the ISK back into real world dollars."
This is important. Very important. This is the only reason why EVEs system is something the players are willing to accept. As soon as you could convert ISK into real USD, the whole game would go down the crapper in record time.
The current EVE system allows the "high end" players to shift the cost of their subscription to a more casual player while paying in ingame assets. There is little incentive to go all-out mad ISK farm as all you can get with ISK (legimately) is game time and the economy is not harmed. It places a soft cap in what you can get by "selling ISK", yet lets people "buy ISK" legimately. Coupled with CCPs self-interest to ban people who deal illegimately (outside the PLEX/GTC system) it truly helps. Every seller (ISK for real money) CCP bans is their competitor as CCP gets the money from the fees used to buy game time. Makes it also easy to justify the enforcement costs.
In the end, every EVE account subscription is paid to CCP in real money and the ISK just changes hands in-game without anyone profiting from it out-of-game. The only party that truly gains is CCP in the form of additional subscriptions - mostly high end players subscribing to multiple accounts simply because they can shift the cost to someone else by paying the subscriptions with ingame assets that the high end players can accumulate faster. Free market also keeps everything in check - if too many people want to buy ISK with time, the ISK value of 30 days of gametime plummets. If too many people want to pay their game time with ISK, the ISK value of game time goes up. Recently the ISK value of game time has been going up.
It truly is the most ingenous way of tackling the problem of RMT I've seen so far. Different from every other system in subtle yet important ways that tie directly to the EVE model where PvP is everywhere and every ship you lose really hurts your bottom line. It truly is the only MMO with a real, working in-game economic system at the moment. The rest are usually inflationary (see: World of Warcraft, even if they have kept the system somewhat sane, there is way too much excess gold floating there)
You're quite correct - generating free cash and injecting it into the economy causes a trickledown and inflates prices across the game. But at the same time, since EVE does have a lot of destruction in it's game, that's not as critical as it sounds - the more expensive fits people fly, the more isk is destroyed when it explodes, and the edge advantage granted by pimp fitting a ship is not particularly extreme - you can maybe take on 2-3 people of your sizeclass, but against any more you're still going to die.
Come on guys, how hard is this concept to grasp? When a ship blows up, not a single isk leaves the economy...the only things getting blown up are assets. The isk sits safely in the wallet of whoever sold that pimp gear to the pilot getting blown up. If you crash your car on the highway the money you paid for it doesn't magically disappear from the dealer's bank account either, does it?
RMT does not generate isk. Blowing stuff up does not destroy isk. In fact, blowing stuff actually injects a small amount of isk into the economy because of the insurance payout on the ship(note for non-players, insurance is a game mechanic where an ingame organization gives you some cash back when you lose your ship, as opposed to ingame money moving around between actual players).
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Sometimes the real life busts in and makes us painfully aware that some people have more, much more disposable income than others.
EVE Online's RMT system is by and large a brilliant idea. People who are so inclined, can buy virtual wealth for real world money, and people who are good at the game can play for free. The developers benefit either case. The vastness of EVE's playerbase however means it includes some individuals who are far, far ahead of the average on the income curve.
In the latest "Great War of EVE", a small Russian alliance RED.Overlord (ROL), with connections to virtual money farming industry, grew hostile with their neighbors, the largest player alliance Goonswarm. A certain VERY well off member of ROL then bought at least 500 billion ingame ISK (~$10k+ worth) from the black market to buy its alliancemates five Titan class capital ships (strategic weapons in EVE which take a lot of effort and 2 months of real time to build). CCP got a whiff of the transaction and banned all the titan pilots and their associates.
Unfettered, ROL's "mysterious benefactor" turned to legal means, and publicly sold 1000 real-money-bought timecards to fund its ingame war effort - a cool $27,000 worth. That is an undeniable fact, with sale threads still visible on EVE's official forums.
A harder to prove, but with the above in mind not the least unlikely, were his solid real-money-bribes to the leaders of other EVE alliances for help in the war. It's rumored that Evil Thug, the leader of a powerful Against All Authorities alliance, received a cool $30,000 bribe to turn his ingame organization against their former friends at Goonswarm, and there are more reliable information that certain leaders of other neighboring alliances received solid five-figure dollar bribes to either turn coat, or at the minimum stay neutral, in this purely ingame conflict. Perhaps interestingly, not many agreed.
Real life bribes don't as such have a lot to do with ingame RMT, but that's because the effect of ingame currency only goes so far, and rallying real people one way or the other is the true means to win.