My view to Gold Farming A.K.A. R.M.T.

Gold Farming A.K.A. RMT (Real Money Trade), technically is my first job and my first business venture.

Back in my gaming days on UO, I have been doing gold farming, capturing prime estate location and selling it to player that want to build house on prime location. Later I also sell castles and other rare items for some quick cash. Yet back then I am just doing this for fun. Until Lineage 1/Diablo 2 at 2000 I start doing as a business, where sell on a daily basis and have gold farming operation set up. Frankly I make good money back then, 8-12 hours of work/playing I can make 50-100 USD per day, that is basically a 1,500-3,000 USD/month. For a 18/19 year old boy that is massive money! Yet that is seriously no life… hence I left a started my real career “Game Developer”.

My first business venture is a venture where I am invited to spear head after my days in En-Tranz. The venture is to set up a RMT facility at Shanghai China. The facility was set up at early 2004, I still remember back in those day there are merely less then a hundred RMT factory set up in China. I believe I was the first facility where our focus is not on brunt force farming but developing strategy on how to farm smarter and more efficiently. Also to form partnership with RMT factory by providing them strategy advice, optimization and business consultation in return for shares of their havest every month. After a few months of making crazy money I decided to leave the industry again and for the last time as I believe that is not what I am destine to do in my life.

Recently there are quite a handful of interviews, researches and articles on the RMT industry. Which makes me want to talk a little bit about RMT. So here it goes. In today’s MMO RMT is an inevitable, if the MMO is consider somewhat successful there will be RMT. Back in the days of Hong Kong Lineage Server, there are probably only 20-30k users in total and still there is RMT. The common practice publisher or developer use to stop gold farming are either: Doing it themself or Banning RMT.

Publisher selling items or even gold will not stop RMT in my opnion. Unless the publisher is willing to go all the way. By that I mean selling every possible levels and rare items of the game. As long as the game is successful and there are things player cannot get easily. RMT will exist in your game as there will be demand for it. Now lets look at the bad side of this approach. By selling items, golds or service yourself. You are actually helping RMT-er to set a pricing standard as you have draw the parrelle. For example, if publisher is selling “Flaming Sword” for 5 USD, then this becomes an index. RMT-er will then have a better reference how much they will charge the player. So how do they reference on it? So basically it will be… if Flaming sword is 5 USD, and in a normal rare getting it will take 5 hours of 1 person thats means whatever RMT-er produce should be rated at 1 USD/hour. Therefore if “Icy Sword” takes 10 hours to farm, then it should be 10 USD.

Banning account… it will only work for a “Short Moment” but at the end RMT will still be there. Look at FFXI, they banned heaps of RMT-ers few years ago, look at it now… No difference… Banning only do 1 thing good, is to make players feels the publisher is taking care of the issue. However in return banning accounts does a few bad things. First it will disturb the game economic which might piss off user. For example, if you banned 70% of the RMT accounts, the economic just suddenly have way less money hence item price will drop sharply. Tom is a normal player he is proud of himself because he got this uber gear that worth 20 million gold, because of the economic, now he only worth 5 millions. Most end game players stays in your game because they like to brag about their gears and fortune. Now they don’t and some will likely leave. Another bad effects is banning on mass like FFXI, even players that have brought gold or totally innocenet will get caught in the big net. Hence you are lost costumer. Plus if who you banned is someone reputatable in the game like a guildmaster or a power player, due to his banning you might lost even MORE player. Lastly RMT-er also pays for your service so you have less customer in ANY CASE.

So how can we stop RMT one might ask. The only way I see is to incorporate the RMT behavior into your game design. Let them exist, regulate them and even more tax them. RMT is like the gambling industry in every countries. Is there a country that manage to totally annaliate it? No, if you don’t allow any gambling it will only make illegal gambling operator makes more money. If one step back a little, if one can tap the gambling industry’s revenue it will actually be better then NONE. This is what most countries starts to realize. This is what I think most game publisher should do, instead of just keep banning and stopping it. Embrace it and make money out of it. Pending on the game type and your morale standard allow it in a certain extend will only do you more good then harm. If any publishers/developers who would like to know how to do it, I am happy to provide my consultation on their MMO designs.