Tag: RMT

Cash Shop Trading Coming To Riders of Icarus


Riders of Icarus

Pop quiz: Name one way in which developers have successfully decreased gold farming while raising revenue. If you guessed tradeable cash shop items, you are correct. Riders of Icarus is the latest title to jump on board the trading bandwagon with the announcement that a new section of the shop will allow players to buy tradeable goods that can be bought and sold on the auction house.

NX Plus is a new section of Ellora’s Shop that’s coming in the next update. Riders can buy items within the NX Plus tab with NX Prepaid and those items are tradable or can be sold on the Auction House!  This new feature will allow more Riders access to more items from Ellora’s Shop. Riders who have gold but lack NX can buy these items as they’re placed on the open market, allowing those Riders access to items previously unavailable to them. Only the items purchased directly from the NX Plus tab can be traded and only when the items are not used or otherwise bound to a Rider.

What’s the catch? Unlike in other titles, the items available on the NX Plus portion of the cash shop won’t be static, they rotate in and out every so often making some items only available for a short period of time. You’ll have to catch the items you want as they are available.

(Source: Nexon)

RuneScape Opens Cash Shop, Sells Cosmetic Items


Earlier this year, Jagex introduced Squeal of Fortune, a daily gambling mini-game where players use tickets to spin for anything from experience boosts, gold, limited availability items, and even high end armor and weapons. Since its release, Squeal of Fortune has been expanded to include exclusive rare items, and Jagex has opened the shop to players to purchase spins with real money. At the time, this raised concerns that Jagex had plans to open a cash shop.

Around now would be where those same people will message their friends and say “I told you so.” Today Jagex released Soloman’s Shop, introducing a fully fledged cash shop into RuneScape. With its initial launch, Jagex will only offer purely cosmetic items for sale. Players are able to buy cosmetic outfits, new “enhanced” animations, emotes, titles, and more. The shop is run on Runecoins, which can be purchased at the price of $4.99 per 200 points, with higher purchases receiving bonus coins similar to Squeal of Fortune with free spins. Items range widely in price, up to 900 for a banner that tells everyone how awesome you are, and 1620 for a complete pack of assassin outfits and emotes.

Members can redeem 200 points for free for the time being, and also receive a 10% discount on items purchased through the store. Free players are not so lucky, however they do have access to the Solomon’s Store.

Jagex Introduces Microtransactions In RuneScape


When Jagex introduced the Squeal of Fortune, they did so with the premise that the mini-game was balanced. Powerful and expensive rewards were relegated to untradeable and extraordinarily rare chances, and each player was only offered one spin per day (two for members). Today, however, Jagex has reversed years of outspoken anti-real money trading policies by introducing an update allowing players to purchase extra spins.

Spins can be bought in packages of 10, 20 (with 5 bonus spins), and 40 (with 35 bonus spins) for $5, $10, and $20 respectively. Jagex has denied that this constitutes paying for an advantage as players are not buying a specific item. The company has also denied that this constitutes gambling as there is no chance of “loss,” as players will always win something, even if it is a cheap 50 coin payout.

The gambling issue, however, stands to be a very important one. This update puts Squeal of Fortune in a similar bracket with lotto bags that many free to play games offer, and depending on if anyone decides to bring question, may constitute gambling and be subject to varying restrictions, laws, and even bans depending on the country.

Regardless of any potential and currently unknown legal implications, this move is sure to draw fire from the community, thanks in part to Jagex’s extreme stance over the past decade against any form of extra payment in return for advantages, and the justifications from developers (see above) as to how this does not violate the core principles is not being received well.

Hopefully more to come as this story develops.

 

World Of Warcraft Legitimizes Gold Buying, Tradeable Cash Shop Pets


I thought I smelled something burning while on the drive back home today. Games like Eve Online fight gold farming by allowing people to purchase game time and sell it for in-game currency. This serves the purpose of keeping the big players playing (for free) while allowing people who need an influx of cash to do so without dealing with Chinese identity thieves. Games like Hellgate Global allow players to trade items they purchased from the cash shop in-game for currency, offering the same system but with a different virtual currency.

World of Warcraft recently released a new cash shop pet, but with a twist. This pet can be traded in-game for gold, and the function is deliberate:

 While our goal is to offer players alternative ways to add a Pet Store pet to their collection, we’re OK with it if some players choose to use the Guardian Cub as a safe and secure way to try to acquire a little extra in-game gold without turning to third-party gold-selling services.

It’s up to the Warcraft community to decide how to take this move, but for all intent and purpose Blizzard has begun selling gold for real money. There isn’t much of a difference between selling something, and selling a coupon to get something for free at the same price as simply buying it outright.

Check out the rest of the page here.

Eve: We’re Fine With RMT, Just Don’t Affect The Economy


CCP and the Eve Online community support pay to win. There I said it. For many of you this will hardly be a tantalizing discovery but it is something that needs to be said to the somewhat-in-denial Eve community: Eve Online is already pay to win, what the community is against are implementations that unbalance the game’s economy.

In Eve Online, for the unfamiliar, players are able to buy Pilot License Extensions as an in-game representation of a 30-day game code. The PLEX can then be sold to other players on the open market for ISK. This system makes it possible to play Eve Online without paying a dime out of your own pocket (CCP still gains the subscription fee), and likewise it allows someone with extra cash to buy ISK. A sanctioned form of real money trading.

In a grand majority of arguments I’ve seen where the idea of Eve having pay to win elements appears, players disassociate the PLEX from RMT by saying that the ships and ISK are still being generated in-game through farming and crafting by legitimate players rather than CCP simply waving their magic wand and shouting “allakhazazzle” and making the ISK appear. Sure a player can spend $90 on PLEX, sell it for whatever the market value is worth (380 million per PLEX as of this writing, approximately), and use it to buy ships/enhancements, but the Eve player’s response is that the ships and the ISK were generated by other players, and thus you don’t have the inflation effect that would occur had CCP just created it. This is a perfectly valid explanation.

Not having an effect on the economy, however, doesn’t do much to throw off the fact that a player is still paying real money to get an advantage over someone who would have had to actually play the game for that ISK. The fundamentals are still there: I have $100, I use it to spend on characters, SP, ships, standing, etc, I get an advantage over someone simply paying $15 a month in subscription costs.

Where the argument tunes in is in this: someone argued to me that it doesn’t matter if someone used real money to buy a ship, because the game is skill based. As they worded it, some random moron with an overloaded bank account can buy all the ships, enhancements, and ammunition he wants. Won’t make a bit of difference when he doesn’t have the skill to pilot or fight with it and ends up losing it in 0.0 space, or AKF-mining. In a way it’s like buying a very expensive gun to go to war with. Yes, your rifle is made of the finest material known to man but it will do you no good when you’re lying dead on the ground because you failed to check that room you passed.

And this brings us right around to the economy issue: Players are against CCP selling non-vanity items because doing so would affect the economy and not for the better. It would set static prices in a game that has built itself on the balance of supply and demand, lower the price of those items and flood the market. This is the same reason CCP is against gold farmers, because they flood the market with ISK, causing inflation and inversely raising the prices of everything, making the game harder for legitimate players.

I’ve said this plenty of times here at MMO Fallout: PLEX is one of the best responses to combat gold farming, because it indulges those who are going to buy currency regardless of what the developers do, but it doesn’t affect the economy as greatly as a cash shop or allowing gold farmers to flourish, it offers a safer avenue than trusting some shady company in China with your credit card, and it also gives the developers a little something-something on the side to line their pockets with. It is a rather unique system, and more importantly a system that works. CCP may not have eradicated gold farming on Eve, but they’ve offered a legitimate alternative.

Eve players (and CCP) are against the destabilization of the economy (in this case, mass inflation), a perfectly reasonable argument considering the health of Eve’s economy is vital to the game itself. Just don’t hide it behind the thin arguments of pay to win, because by the logic of the opposition such a system either already exists or cannot exist due to the nature of the game.

Eve: We're Fine With RMT, Just Don't Affect The Economy


CCP and the Eve Online community support pay to win. There I said it. For many of you this will hardly be a tantalizing discovery but it is something that needs to be said to the somewhat-in-denial Eve community: Eve Online is already pay to win, what the community is against are implementations that unbalance the game’s economy.

In Eve Online, for the unfamiliar, players are able to buy Pilot License Extensions as an in-game representation of a 30-day game code. The PLEX can then be sold to other players on the open market for ISK. This system makes it possible to play Eve Online without paying a dime out of your own pocket (CCP still gains the subscription fee), and likewise it allows someone with extra cash to buy ISK. A sanctioned form of real money trading.

In a grand majority of arguments I’ve seen where the idea of Eve having pay to win elements appears, players disassociate the PLEX from RMT by saying that the ships and ISK are still being generated in-game through farming and crafting by legitimate players rather than CCP simply waving their magic wand and shouting “allakhazazzle” and making the ISK appear. Sure a player can spend $90 on PLEX, sell it for whatever the market value is worth (380 million per PLEX as of this writing, approximately), and use it to buy ships/enhancements, but the Eve player’s response is that the ships and the ISK were generated by other players, and thus you don’t have the inflation effect that would occur had CCP just created it. This is a perfectly valid explanation.

Not having an effect on the economy, however, doesn’t do much to throw off the fact that a player is still paying real money to get an advantage over someone who would have had to actually play the game for that ISK. The fundamentals are still there: I have $100, I use it to spend on characters, SP, ships, standing, etc, I get an advantage over someone simply paying $15 a month in subscription costs.

Where the argument tunes in is in this: someone argued to me that it doesn’t matter if someone used real money to buy a ship, because the game is skill based. As they worded it, some random moron with an overloaded bank account can buy all the ships, enhancements, and ammunition he wants. Won’t make a bit of difference when he doesn’t have the skill to pilot or fight with it and ends up losing it in 0.0 space, or AKF-mining. In a way it’s like buying a very expensive gun to go to war with. Yes, your rifle is made of the finest material known to man but it will do you no good when you’re lying dead on the ground because you failed to check that room you passed.

And this brings us right around to the economy issue: Players are against CCP selling non-vanity items because doing so would affect the economy and not for the better. It would set static prices in a game that has built itself on the balance of supply and demand, lower the price of those items and flood the market. This is the same reason CCP is against gold farmers, because they flood the market with ISK, causing inflation and inversely raising the prices of everything, making the game harder for legitimate players.

I’ve said this plenty of times here at MMO Fallout: PLEX is one of the best responses to combat gold farming, because it indulges those who are going to buy currency regardless of what the developers do, but it doesn’t affect the economy as greatly as a cash shop or allowing gold farmers to flourish, it offers a safer avenue than trusting some shady company in China with your credit card, and it also gives the developers a little something-something on the side to line their pockets with. It is a rather unique system, and more importantly a system that works. CCP may not have eradicated gold farming on Eve, but they’ve offered a legitimate alternative.

Eve players (and CCP) are against the destabilization of the economy (in this case, mass inflation), a perfectly reasonable argument considering the health of Eve’s economy is vital to the game itself. Just don’t hide it behind the thin arguments of pay to win, because by the logic of the opposition such a system either already exists or cannot exist due to the nature of the game.