I think it's a good idea, unless VR legitimately thinks they're well staffed enough to police third party RMT and actually successfully do so.
RMT currencies like Krono basically just exist to make sure that third party RMT becomes less profitable and that revenue is redirected to the company itself. It makes sense and it's very practical, because literally no MMO (even P99) has managed to successfully eliminate it.
You call it game ruining cancer, I call it a smart move on the part of developers as a decent countermeasure against third party RMT. I am not confident in VR whatsoever to be able to shut down the RMT that will definitely exist in Pantheon.
I would personally prefer not to see them in game.
I think they can help game like WoW make money and turn F2P players into paying ones via these tokens in a roundabout way, but that's all I really see happening is WoW making money from the otherwise "free" player. (WoW is still hurting after losing over 7 million subscribers ahile back - 7 million times $15 a month... that's a lot of money for an MMO to lose)
Wouldn't less people RMT if it's some blackhat bannable offense? If you had it as a feature sure the developers make money from it rather than third party, but I would imagine a lot more people will do it.
So assuming spending real money to buy items in game is bad and not a desired feature, what lessens it? Having a krono type item or trying to just ban people caught RMT'ing? Id assume it's the latter.
If the game can't stay afloat without the developers making money from players wanting to RMT their way to items, I think that's a bigger problem.
Here are several posts about this topic.
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3112/form-of-payments/view/page/1
Thallium said:Wouldn't less people RMT if it's some blackhat bannable offense? If you had it as a feature sure the developers make money from it rather than third party, but I would imagine a lot more people will do it.
So assuming spending real money to buy items in game is bad and not a desired feature, what lessens it? Having a krono type item or trying to just ban people caught RMT'ing? Id assume it's the latter.
If the game can't stay afloat without the developers making money from players wanting to RMT their way to items, I think that's a bigger problem.
It also is a bannable offense in most games. The problem is that it can't be enforced well on a large scale.
Laws are only as good as how well they can be enforced.
It's about what would lessen the effect if we are in agreement RMT is bad id rather only a small percent of people did it behind closed doors than a large visible portion of the player base were running around in gear purchased with their wallet not what they achieved in game.
Thallium said:It's about what would lessen the effect if we are in agreement RMT is bad id rather only a small percent of people did it behind closed doors than a large visible portion of the player base were running around in gear purchased with their wallet not what they achieved in game.
That's a design issue with equipment availability, not RMT.
Just don't make the gear you can purchase with plat that amazing? Kronos exist on Phinigel but you won't even scrape the top 100 list on the leaderboards with gear you can buy in the Bazaar.
While I am very much inclined to yell No Way !. I understand some of the reasons behind these tokens. It is a bit like the Volstead Act in the U.S. . It lead to the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The outright banning of alcohol created the opening for a huge amout of criminal activity and provided the opportunity for organized crime to profit from the situation. That was repealed like 12 years later after it was obvious that it would not work. The tax revenue that was made after the 18th was tossed out was substantial. These tokens are a way to take back some control over an almost uncontrollable situation. It was found later that during prohibition that there were almost a million illegal drinking establishments operating in the U.S. at the time.
While this is not a perfect example it provides some historical insight into what happens when you have a pent up demand and that demand is filled one way or another.
I still hate to see it happen; I want to be all warm and fuzzy and think we can stop all very bad behaviour as a partnership between VR and the Community. A little bad behaviour adds some spice to things.
Liav said:Thallium said:It's about what would lessen the effect if we are in agreement RMT is bad id rather only a small percent of people did it behind closed doors than a large visible portion of the player base were running around in gear purchased with their wallet not what they achieved in game.
That's a design issue with equipment availability, not RMT.
Just don't make the gear you can purchase with plat that amazing? Kronos exist on Phinigel but you won't even scrape the top 100 list on the leaderboards with gear you can buy in the Bazaar.
The reason, I assume, most people would see RMT as a bad thing is because you're using influence from outside the game to obtain power within the game despite you ordinarily not being able to do so.
If a game is a shared experience that is both cooperative and competitive do you want to introduce any element of pay to win?
Just because it won’t affect those people at the very end of the game doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue for others? If the game is only interesting at the very end point why even have the first part? I thought the idea was to make the game a challenging and enjoyable experience from the start to end. Why corrupt any part of that with pay to win elements?
It's not a perfect solution and it probably does agitate economies to an extent. The pragmatist in me can't really come up with a better way to combat RMT though. If it was my company, I would surely recognize the futility in fighting it and instead secure extra guaranteed revenue.
The alternative is they don't do that, and the various popular plat selling sites fulfill that service anyway. The difference being VR makes $0 as a result.
So, when people are breaking the rules, someone might as well profit from it, instead of fixing it?
IMHO I would NOT like to see this in Pantheon. It does exist in other games and it flourishes because the people let it. In project 1999 there is no tokens. But the high levels still farm items and sell them for a lot more than they ever sold for in eq. People tend to buy them because they are unable to get the items ingame because of the heavy farming of those items. I think the only way to stop this is for all rare items to be lore and no trade at aquire. As far as tokens go my thoughts are the sub should be payable to VR only and should not be given out because you are too lazy to work for it or pay for it. If there is tokens provided by VR they should only be usefull on the account where your character is and non-transferable.
I liked the ability to purchase a Krono's type token. You have to really see why people like it. Not everyone can run to a store and purchase a game card anymore, so the next best thing is in game kronos tokens.
I bought them, and applied to any account i wanted to. I am not talking just 1 or two, i am talking about 20-30 of them.
I would save some money over using the CC, USD to CDN prices. Sometimes i even didnt care, but they are really easy to use for subscriptions.
To trade them? if you have more then one account, buying 2 tokens and being able to trade them to your other account (family accounts that is) it becomes a great tool for people like me.
Lets say i needed in game gold? i could trade a token for 500,000 gold. It was a legit purhase through the game, for in game gold. Nothing bad about it.
You guys do so much worse by influxing the in game ecomony that something like this should not matter.
Beefcake said:So, when people are breaking the rules, someone might as well profit from it, instead of fixing it?
Only an idealist would believe that VR actually has the capability to stop third party RMT. So, yes. The problem literally can not be fixed.
If the problem can not be fixed, it makes a lot of sense to just mitigate the damage by doing something like Krono and designing your game from the ground up to facilitate that kind of economy.
Phinigel isn't a pay to win server by any means and we've had Krono here since day one.
This tokens have no real influence on the black market. The third party sites can still sell items for real life money, or sell items for tokens and then sell the tokens for real life money.
In my opinion the second way is just more expensive for the players but let VR participate on that business. Not only because more subscription tokens can be sold, as are needed to pay the actual subsciption fees, but because of another reason as well.
Example: for a standard subscription 13$ are charged, for a token 15$ are charged. To be able to sell the token, the third party site has to charge a value below 13$ for it, lets say 10 $.
If the third party site wants to earn 10$ for a new sword they charge 1 token. For this a player A pays VR 15$.
The third party site then has to sell the token to another player B who needs a subscritpion for 10$.
In the end all seem to be happy.
VR earns 15$ for the subscription, 2$ more as the standard fee.
The third party site earns 10$
Player A has his new sword (but payed 5$ more as needed, because of supporting VR and player B).
Player B saved 3$ when only paying 10$ for a month subscription.
So the question is fight against or confederate with the third party sites.
While I think scenario 2 is better than scenario 1, because of more happy people ;), the best scenario would be with no items sold for real life money.
Maybe we should start without the tokens and try to fight the third party sites and if the war is lost, maybe introduce tokens and confederate with them.
WoW tokens are... arguably the largest example of P2W in any MMO ever. When Legion dropped, there was a bunch of streamers who dropped a few hundred dollars to get ahead of everyone else when it came to purchasing inflated mats from the market place... some making thousands of golds of profit and getting a strong early advantage over those who did not.
No, they are an absolutely terrible idea.
The only thing they 'solve' is gold selling... by making the developers the gold sellers who have absolute control over the value of their in game currency. Oh wait.
Maybe we could pay 20 -25 dollars a month sub so VR can afford to hire a few people to vigorously go after accounts that are selling for real life money. It will cost in some way no matter what , just constantly police it with extreme prejudice from the start and have the player base pay for it so their game is as free of this problem as possible.
With all of the smart people on this forum, somebody may yet come up with a ground breaking approach to help solve this issue. I also hate the idea of the token thing, but I hate the gold farmer / third party site sales worse
I personally have no issue paying a bit more for a higher quality product. I understand this may not work for some.
Skycaster said:Maybe we could pay 20 -25 dollars a month sub so VR can afford to hire a few people to vigorously go after accounts that are selling for real life money. It will cost in some way no matter what , just constantly police it with extreme prejudice from the start and have the player base pay for it so their game is as free of this problem as possible.
With all of the smart people on this forum, somebody may yet come up with a ground breaking approach to help solve this issue. I also hate the idea of the token thing, but I hate the gold farmer / third party site sales worse
I personally have no issue paying a bit more for a higher quality product. I understand this may not work for some.
Banning accounts that generate RMT doesn't do anything, that's the point. Creating a new account could cost $500 and it'd still be profitable to do so to continue farming.
It doesn't matter how aggressive you are. If you go after buyers instead of sellers, then you end up banning thousands of players and losing a ton of money. If you go after sellers, well, Hail Hydra.
I absolutely don't want to see those tokens in Pantheon. IMO they hurt the game more than they help.
And yes, it will be a hard (and continuous) fight against the gold sellers, but IMO it is still better to take up the fight instead of just giving up without even trying.