“My mystery has to do with Om Malik. I can not, for the life of me, figure out how one of the smartest, most educated, and least echo-chamberish real Journalists (capital-Jay, yeah he’s that good) can tolerate an utterly undereducated, self-important, and pretentious tool and Second Life shill like Wagner James Au on his staff.”

With that said, Mythic, Square Enix, etc, etc. have every right to take action against players choose to use external currency to purchase/sell game data that doesn’t belong to them. There are very few publishers and developers who actually allow or want people to use RMT services. RMTs, which included the buying and selling of in-game currency, items, and/or accounts, are all violating software license agreements and/or terms of services agreements each player agrees to when they sign up. Essentially they are buying and selling information that doesn’t belong to them (which can be said to be stealing).

It should also be said that these activities never fall under the “Fair Usage Act” like making videos, screenshots or information about in-game activities like quests, tips, etc unless specified in license agreements or announcements by the publisher. Even if the RMTs and buyers are located in areas not covered by copyright laws, they are still in violation of the agreements they themselves have agreed to. In simpler terms, your character and data within the game doesn’t belong to you at all.

Where companies have chosen not to enforce the rules they have put in place doesn’t matter. Many companies choose not to pursue the violators for a number of reasons like, financially unfeasible, scope of violators too small, scope of violators to large, etc, etc. At any time the publishers/developers may start enforcing those rules if they want and the user can’t do anything about it except quit the game, delete the software or take the matter directly with the company representatives. Other reasons for allowing the behavior may also included the community acceptance/rejection of the behavior or how much of an effect it has on in-game worlds or even negative press.

My own personal feelings are that the behavior adds nothing to the game and actually hurts legitimate players who do what they can to enjoy the game. Plain and simple, it’s cheating. There are a lot of people start playing MMOs with the same mindset as single player games where cheating and quick routes are many times built into the game. So they drift in the immersing worlds of MMOs with that same mindset without the understanding that MMOs are never meant to be completed. There are others that come from other MMOs where the behavior is acceptable/unchecked by the publishers/developers and assume this game is the same way. Or, they are in “late-comers” to the game and feel like they have to “catch-up” to every else.

What it comes down to is that RMTs interfere with my ability to enjoy and experience the full dynamics of the game. They should be removed and the local game community should shun anyone who partakes of those services, no matter how little they think it effects them. You are renting access to the data from the publisher/developer, if you don’t like it, don’t play or make your own game to play without the restrictions.

…end rant

I would have to count myself in that 22 percent. I did buy gold from a gold seller. Once.

I hated it, and would never do it again. It completely ruined the game I was playing.

I play for $15/month because among other things it’s a great value. But as soon as you buy gold for real dollars, everything in the game has its own dollar amount attached to it. This axe is 35 cents. That bundle is $1.65. The amount of gold you just made for the last 3 hours having fun with your friends now has a dollar amount. In the end, the game you play as a diversion from real life becomes JUST LIKE real life. And the great value at $15/month now costs $35, $55, $90 per month.

Worse yet, the joy is gone. The sense of accomplishment of finally getting that thing you lusted over for 15 levels isn’t there when you merely opened your wallet for it. Even if you DID get in on the raid, killed the boss, won the roll, and got the item the hard way, it doesn’t seem to mean much, because you could have just bought it.

I lost interest in the game. Nothing held any real value to me anymore. Nothing was fun. Nothing was worth taking the time to do when I could just buy it, and nothing was worth owning if I wasn’t going to spend time playing. I could afford to spend hundreds of dollars on things I longer cared to have. I drifted away from the game. It was no longer worth the money I was spending, not even worth the $15/month anymore. I cancelled soon after I bought gold.

I watched a couple of friends do the same thing. They bought gold, got some great stuff, twinked themselves out. Then… never really played after that. There just wasn’t much point.

So the most damning thing I can say about gold sellers is not that they interrupt the rest of the gamers by spamming chat channels, rudely camping spawns, or driving up prices by dumping huge piles of gold into the economy that wouldn’t otherwise exist. I contend that allowing gold sellers to do their thing actually causes the very people who buy the gold to leave the game sooner. And enjoy it less.

So, even though I would technically be included in that 22 percent that at some point in time bought gold in an online game, my own response to gold sellers is exactly the same as MJ’s.

Go to Hell.

Apart from guilds, you have the auction house where people sell unwanted gear. Prices are already getting out of hand and will settle down as the game ages. But if RMT is introduced then the economy becomes inflated so that only those who participate in RMT can afford to utilize the auction house.

I applaud WH’s stance on gold spammers/sellers in game. Not only are the unsolicited tells (akin to cold calls via telephone that a majority of people despise according to the national DNC database) a distraction, they clutter up the chat system that is supposed to be there for game information. Personally I ignore and report each gold seller that contacts me, but when 5 or more messages come through in less than two minutes time it becomes extremely irritating.

Abuse of a game mechanic is abuse of a game mechanic, be it outside hack programs to give your online character an advantage, exploiting a bug to gain an advantage, or using RMT to gain an advantage.

And I just happen to be a 38yo father of three who fits well into the “only have so many hours a week left over to play games.”

I say good riddens to the gold spam, and the more they eliminate the more accounts they will have to buy outright and loose again. At some point it wont be worth it for them to continue. All I can say is watch out for these accounts being sold on Ebay since its banned out.

The Daedalus Project data referenced are two years old, and WAR has been publicly running for less than two months. From the limited context you provide in the one quoted statement you provide from Mr. Yee, it’s not whether he’s referring to WAR or to MMOs as a whole.

What authority do you have to extrapolate Daedalus Project data into WAR? What are your qualifications to discuss WAR? How much of it have you played, and for how long?

Admittedly, you have a point, but I think the matter is the speed at which such a degeneration occurs. Ostensibly, however, natural progression (sans RMT) would create a bell curve in which a nominal level of wealth could be considered “average”, for any number of reasons.

However, introducing RMT into the equation feasibly creates a much taller, narrower curve; less like a bell, and more like a spike. Your median becomes stupendously extreme, and your ends are that much further away from it.

For the record, just so I can make thing a bit clearer on my opinion: Most of my objections to RMT come from the fact that ultimately, a game is designed to have rules. We don’t neccesarily like all the rules, but they exist, in order to ensure that all players within said game have a fair and equal shot.

I don’t neccesarily thing RMT is a bad idea (assuming it was done by the company running the game, had no intrusive in-game adverts, and was priced fairly); my issue lies mostly in the fact that people are willing to leverage an advantage unrelated to the game (real world liquid assets) to make themselves superior in game, when not everyone can do the same. In a game like WAR especially, which is by nature a very competitive game that needs strict rules to ensure fair competition, it goes against the spirit of the game itself.

Its like using cheats to beat Contra, and then bragging about how skilled you are.