I’m so bored of these recurring, pointless topics that I don’t even care to search the archive of this site here and relink what I wrote in the past. Lum wrapped up the issue perfectly in a short comment:

I’d go one further – if players are actively seeking to pay actual money to avoid parts of your game, you may have some design issues. And no, it’s not an opportunity to find a new revenue stream, it’s a danger signal, because a vast majority of your customers will not shell out more money to avoid The Bad Parts.

You really cannot go further than that. As I wrote, the rest is useless chatter and endless arguing. What is important is understand from where problems come from and learn from the experience. Delving into an aspect is useless if you cannot understand the context.

The context of the Real Money Trade is a “design mistake”. So the RMT is an anomaly that shouldn’t even be there. An anomaly that instead of being researched in every detail, should be extirpate at the root without hesitation. Because it’s an element that breaks every principle ruling the context: the fact that the ultimate product is a game.

Seconding the RTM means bending the design of the game in a way not appropriate. It means refusing to solve the problems that the game presents. If the RMT is legitimated also all the problems that brought to it are then excused as appropriate. This is nonsense. A wicked model that is destined to fail.

Chasing the RMT is an apparent way to make money because it is based on an illusory model. This is what is implicitly written in the last line I quoted from Lum here above. The players won’t adapt themselves to creative marketing, instead they migrate to those games that *actively solve* those glaring problems at the root of the gameplay. The market itself is not stagnant and doesn’t need new revenues stream. What the market needs and will reward is the concrete movement that brings to better games.

On a similar level it becomes obvious as even the opposite solution to the RMT (fighting actively the farmers, for example) is equally useless. It’s again a way to divert the eyes from the real problems to their symptoms. The presence of the farmers is a symptom of a broken game. Fighting endlessly the symptom brings to no results and lots of energy wasted because, once again, noone cared to observe the cause and try to solve it directly. Not even because it’s philosophically good, but because it’s an effective way to make a game successful and popular. Which would be a pretty significant and understandable goal, I believe.

So, again, the money will go to who is able to observe the problems in these games and offer intelligent and effective solutions. Those who expect to “ride the wave” of a trend and believe that RMT is an effective way to expand the market, are just short-sighted goons that will fall on their asses. The RMT is a way to second the problem and exploit it in the short term. It’s a way to demonstrate how you are clueless about what really drives these games and that will bring to an unacceptable waste of resources.

It’s not a case that this is happening at SOE. Aggro Me points at another example of “wasted resources”. All these examples aren’t detached one from the other. We have a company that simply doesn’t remember anymore what they are supposed to do. They don’t have anymore goals to reach if not making money out of the blue. So they desperately trying to invent new ways to make money out of the blue since their games alone cannot stand anymore the market. Those “games” that now look as a distant background.

But this isn’t also similar to what happens at Mythic? This is a company with a completely opposite stance to SOE. They would never accept to support the RMT because they believe that it’s a practice that actively damages their games. Okay, but then they apply a similar pattern to another context in a subtle way. It’s a few weeks that I criticize their latest design choices. I defined them as “short term good and long term bad”. Mythic, along the history of DAoC, has always kept a conservative approach to the design aimed more to find fancy workarounds and bandaids to problems than to directly address the issues with some courage and… vision.

Each of these solutions has the lowest common denominator in the fact that they are all *temporary*. They are usable in the short term but will bring to even more problems in the long term. And isn’t this exactly the same as riding the wave of the RMT? Isn’t this yet another way to dodge and dismiss the problems of the game to just find workarounds and content the players for a few more weeks?

The new “classic” servers they launched and the new island they are adding to bring back “Emain”, are all short term sweeteners in the hope to retain the players (in particular the returning ones, prizing on the illusory sense of nostalgia) a bit longer and, at the same time, yet another excuse to dodge the real problems that are making the game sink more and more as the time passes.

This approach is not effective and won’t bring to results. Other games like WoW have seen this insane success because they were able to undestand and isolate those problems that were never addressed effectively in other games and propose something new. What they did is extremely simple. They *stole* the unused potential of the other games and capitalized on their faults. While everyone else was sitting and watching, believing that nothing could change, they were able to anticipate the new possibilities and suggest effective solutions.

This is the behaviour of the market. The money will go to who is able to anticipate the solutions. To who is able to observe and learn and always retain this dynamism and ambition. The stagnation, instead, will always bring to mediocre results and downward trends even in those cases where there would be enough resources to reach completely different results.