RMT, Spam and you…(part 2)

OK, so earlier I posted something about the evils of supporting RMT…I mentioned it once again to my friend playing World of Warcraft and why it’s bad.

Her response: “I don’t have enough time to sit there and play WoW like all those 18 year olds that sit around all day with nothing better to do.”

OK, come on now…How the hell do you think I have amassed a small (and very modest) fortune playing EverQuest II? I have spent numerous hours farming low level dungeons for “teh phat lewtz!” I also make crap to sell to people on the broker. I’ve been working very hard to support my small army of alts for a LONG time now, and I by no means, sit around like “those 18 year olds that have nothing better to do.” I have a job, I work the same hours, if not more than her and her buddy, at the same job. My commute is at LEAST an hour long, if not longer. I get home, have to deal with dinner, the dog, the woman, etc. I usually spend a couple hours sitting around with the wife complaining about politics and watching MSNBC (sometimes I wonder why though, Dan Abrams can be rather boring with all the stupid crap he has commentary on – Olberman, now I usually miss most of the show, but he’s at least got something to say). She was proud of the fact her friend (who also works with us) found a new site to purchase WoW currency from that doesn’t use the mail to deliver. I guess Blizzard has been intercepting RMT transactions that take place via their mail system for a while, and neither of them were able to purchase currency.

From what I understand they let you get the mail message with the illegal money attached, but you can’t get it out of the message. ROFL! That’s awesome…let it sit there, their own $50 or whatever they paid, staring them in the face, knowing full well they just basically took a lighter and burned it up. BWHAHAHA! Ingenious I tell you! The only drawback I see to this is it doesn’t stop the people supporting the industry, just pisses them off a bit. OK, so I can understand a n00b to the whole thing seeing ads on a lot of the reputable gaming sites out there for online currency, and them deciding to try buying some. When they’re caught, they should get a warning, because I’m sure there are many of them that don’t read the EULA, and it doesn’t occur to them that it’s not nice to do that. When you have the same people consistently participating in RMT, BAN ALL OF THEIR ACCOUNTS! Come on, I mean seriously, how many man hours and dollars is it costing Blizzard to sit there and let these people continue to support RMT in their game. They have to spend a whole lot of customer service man power, coder time etc to combat the various problems that RMT creates.

Many of the MMO companies out there profess that they punish the buyers as well as the sellers as much as they can. I truly believe them, I know a bit about their views on it from interacting with many of them, and they do care about it. Not only do the guys doing the money care, but the developers themselves care for more reasons than money. I’m sure there’s not a developer that’s seen it happen that hasn’t said “What the hell? I spent all this time making this a GOOD GAME, and some jerk goes around and makes it pointless to even play.” When you have a case of my two friends at work being able to continue playing after being repeatedly caught up in Blizzard’s RMT filtering, and being allowed to continue playing, how is that punishing them? I think that’s the one fatal flaw in their RMT filtering. I pretty much told her when I was trying to get her to come play EQ2, she couldn’t play with me unless she played legit. I for one don’t want more of it coming to EQ2, and I certainly don’t want to get caught up in a banning sweep because I happened to have some interraction with her characters involved in RMT. Yeah, I’ve heard the whining people screaming on various forums “but xxx company makes so much money off xxx accounts, they don’t care.” That is completely not true. Every single one of them cares, they have to pay the man hours to deal with the effects of RMT on the legitimate player population. I don’t think the amount of money they’re making off the accounts involved in EULA breaking activities would amount to the salary of the 5 or 10 or 20 people they have to pay to code for things like SPAM! I mean think about it. SOE put out their spam filters this summer. I can only imagine how much they ended up paying in man-hours to develop it. Let’s put some theoretical numbers out there and show you WHY these companies like Bizzard, SOE, and CCP care about RMT, and why they would love for it to go away.

You have some employees, making an average of $40k a year. One of them gets put on a project to develop spam filters. For the first month or two you have anywhere from 2-5 people developing the specs, plan, and general implementation for the filtering. OK, right there you’ve now used up between $20k-$30k in salaries for the 2-5 people just to get the project rolling. Now you have three to four months of development with probably another 2-5 people doing the coding. That’s another $50k-$60k dollars in salaries spent. Now youre up to close to $100k then you have to put the code through QC. This is where you probably get another 5-10 people (assuming they’re not volunteers) testing to see if it’s going to break. We’ll lowball the testers and say they’re getting paid part time. You put it in for testing for a week. You’re looking at another $2k-$3k spent just testing. OK, so no bugs found in the initial testing, looks good to go. At this point you now have spent probably over $100k in resources that could have been spent to MAKE IMPROVEMENTS AND ADD CONTENT TO YOUR GAME. Now, granted these are hypothetical numbers, but I seriously doubt they’re that far off. This is only a portion of the cost. Now let’s say you have a few thousand people participating in RMT purchasing in your game in one form or another. That’s $30k-$50k a month. You then have the sellers. They usually use throw away accounts, and a lot of the time purchased with stolen credit cards. So you average another $1,000 in a month, minus the money that isn’t paid because if credit card fraud. In six months you make around $180k-$200k. In that period of time you’re only netting a total profit of $80k-$100k as opposed to $180k-$200k for everyone being legit. Then comes the times when the servers are borked because you’re trying to stop the spam. There’s another loss of revenue from having to spend money and resources to fix the problem, loss of potential customers, and having to pay customer service representatives to deal with unhappy players. As time goes on your profit from the EULA breaking individuals keeps diminishing because you also have to pay for on going issues where people try to get customer service to deal with being ripped off and not getting their currency. So, no, they’re not making money off this crap, they’re LOSING MONEY AND DEVELOPMENT TIME and the rest of their PAYING CUSTOMERS that PLAY BY THE RULES suffer because you have a bunch of lazy people that want to earn their achievements with their wallets rather than enjoying a game.

Not only does purchasing currency cheapen the experience for the people that buy it, but it also is a huge let down for someone who spent months doing the things legitimately to acquire whatever uberness they have in the virtual world they play in. Honestly, what’s the point if you can just open your wallet and buy everything that the game has to offer without any work? Where’s the fun in being able to just drop a bunch of money to avoid PLAYING the game you’re paying for? How stupid is that? You’re paying to enjoy a game, and yet the basis for enjoying the game is completely circumvented by your wallet. If you’re not looking to spend the time to achieve something, in the way the game is designed, then maybe you are playing the wrong game.

So for those that want to participate in RMT, do us all a favor, go play Second Life or whatever and leave us alone to enjoy the games we play, they way they were intended.

~ by g0thicicecream on November 19, 2007.