design: limiting the real money trading cheat

Real money trading (RMT) is a result of users being able to organize themselves on the web and selling their in-world assets for real money. This detracts from the virtual world as a coherent self-sustaining entity and real-world inequalities spill over into the game. So what can you do about it?

There have been many discussions in places like Terranova, Raph's blog and Tobold's blog, but most designers seem to agree that RMT is an evil that cannot be eliminated without harming the game. I don't disgree with this assertion, although I believe it can be controlled.

So what are the most obvious options for a designer wanting to control RMT? The simple answer: To design for it or remove what enables it.

The Trading Card Game

Embrace and extend what is going on in existing games on a relatively limited level by making it the core focus of the game. Design the game from the ground up as a trading card game. By selling random undisclosed assets you get to sell the same useless equipment over and over, forcing players wanting the best stuff to keep spinning the lottery wheel, paying thousands of dollars. As there are no opportunities to gain assets cheaply the RMT market is curbed. The RMT market is further curbed by making cards either consumables or timelimited and having them stick to the character on first use.

The Fading Template Game

This is basically a class-based design in which you don't pay for an account, but purchase the right to play a specific class of characters. You can then provide opportunities for upgrades and multiclassing. Let characters' abilities rise and fade over time, following a predetermined curve, basically forcing the player to purchasing upgrades from the game company at regular intervals. This also curbs the RMT market as there is no way to gain assets cheaply and assets loose value over time. The net advantage is that you can provide the service at multiple pricepoints and that players can switch back and forth between cheap and expensive options depending on their activity level.

The Inflation Game

Forget everything you know about creating a balanced design. Try to get the inflation rate as high as possible. Deflate the value of all assets continuously. Investing in assets become a lot less attractive. The key example of this type of game is a reset based game.

The No Feedback Game

Make sure that there is no way for the player to objectively tell what the capabilities of a character is and no way to tell what the the capabilities or remaining duration of assets are. This curbs the RMT market as there is no way to know whether you get what you pay for. The net advantage is that it doesn't curb gifting.

The Neutral Game

All assets are average, exchangable and easy and fun to obtain. Nothing is special, players have to depend on social relations, knowledge and real skills.

The Social Game

Focus heavily on prestige related to group membership. Each guild is a hierarchy to climb with their own rules about how to climb the hierarchy and how to go about it, and it is supervised by guild representatives. You don’t eliminate RMT, as you can still have a RMT guild, but they would have less prestige. So it matters less.

The bullet list.

Limiting RMT means attacking the foundations which makes RMT attractive.

• Focus on how, not what. Assets are easier to trade than situastions.
• Focus on collective achievements. Collective achievements encourage group identity, group prestige and moral and makes hiding RMT-bought assets from your peers more difficult.
• Focus on lots of tiny assistance (sp?), discourage players from giving big one-shot favours. That makes selling a service tedious and you thus have to rely on real friends to support you.
• No sex before marriage: Require players to spend time with people they receive major favours from. This doesn't prevent RMT, but ensures that you are tied to the person, thus you have to think twice about who you receive major favours from. It better be someone that you want close ties with.
• Focus on diversity. Selling assets which the purchaser has no knowledge of is difficult. If all items are different and personalized then the market for each item will be difficult to find.
• Focus on customization and use-once assets. It doesn't prevent RMT, but limits trades to whole charcters.
• Focus on transparency. Let players prove that they have gained their trophees themselves, you cannot sell honour.
• Focus on independent groups. RMT-based groups should not be allowed to rule non-RMT groups.

Label the cheaters and attach fingerprints to creations

The most potent tool for reducing the negative effects of RMT is entirely psychological. Strive for a cohesive culture in which RMT is viewed as non-threatening. RMT is most damaging to the magic circle if it is viewed as the main route to success. If those who object to RMT can choose to view RMT as a failure or non-important then it will trouble them less.

Remember that do-it-yourselfers, roleplayers and artists don’t suffer from RMT. Encourage those activities which involves personal expression. For an artist the template is a failure, breaking away from the template is (partial) success. Everbody in a group can be “an artist” within that group’s culture (a great moderator, a great leader, a great joker etc). Associate prestige with that which have your own personal stamp on it. You cannot purchase your own fingerprints. Having other people appreciate that which is essentially you is an invaluable aspect of virtual worlds.

In essence, make sure that what the users value the most cannot be bought for a high price. Signs of honour have to be authentic.

pattern: inflation based expansion

Virtual worlds usually have static and dynamic aspects. For pragmatic reasons most online games provide static environments where the gameplay is fairly predictable. Common wisdom says that metamorphosis is more problematic than expansion...

Unfortunately, continuous expansion without any clean-up can turn the world into an incoherent inflation mess.

Advantages

Inflation solves the long term consequences of hoarding and content starvation without taking anything away from the players by force. If the expansion treats all players fairly this is perceived as being more acceptable than a nerf, even though the overall effect isn't all that different.

Introducing new more valuable content can shorten the gap between older players and newer players by gradually deprecating the old world in favour of a newer world. This assumes that the new content doesn't favour older players over newer players. Unfortunately, reality is often different.

You can keep the world fresh and competitive, which in turn gives you free press.

Disadvantages

The real danger of focusing on growth by expansion is that you create social gaps between groups of players. If the land areas expand too much player density may be too low for good sociability.

You also risk getting a widening gap between hardcore oldbies and casual newbies, creating fractures in the social fabric of established social groups as well as in the overall social sphere of the world.

The addition of new items tend to make older items useless, making the world confusing for both newbies and revisiting players. Revisiting players may feel like newbies and choose not to come back after having a brief look. In addition old play-guides and other non-controlled content become misleading which may cause additional confusion.

And finally, continuous development is expensive. Especially if the foundational architecture isn't solid.

Solutions

Some of the disadvantages can be addressed by recycling and deprecation.

Problem: When adding content it is tempting to focus on high level content. The effect is that casual players feel left out. This increases the gap between harcore and casual, oldbies and newbies.

Solution: Rescaling of the achievement-ladder. Some games do this by extending the number of levels and increasing XP gain at lower levels. Basically, as real time progress, the lower level players get their efficiency improved. This we might call level-inflation. Developers should not forget the lower level players when they design expansions. The synergetic effect is that more low-level content increases replayability.

Problem: Expansions are easier to make than changes, both technologically and socially. Unfortunately, the population growth might not match your content growth. Too much expansion may lead to a less socializable desert, too many trash items and overall lower usability for newbies.

Solution: deprecate content. Maintain several sets of content on all levels, of which one set is meant to be less attractive and phased out. When the popularity of this set is low, remove it or refurbish it.

Problem: Expansions are expensive.

Solution: Plan and design for recycling and refurbishment. High level content that has been deprecated can be introduced as mid-level content, thus retaining those players who never will make it to the highest levels. Removed monsters can be refurbished and tweakd and play secondary roles in new content.

Problem: Expansions might feel like a nerf for revisiting players.

Solution: Design for replayability and let players gain some in-game advantages based on how long they have been subscribers. Even XP or other types of capital.

Checklist

This list is temporary.

• What effects and how varied are the effects of introducing new content?Have you considered all groups, including newbies and revisiting players?

• Have you planned right from the start how to deal with rescaling of character-levels? How far can you expand your level range?

• What are the weak spots in your architecture? Where does it handle growth, deprecation and refurbing? Where does it not?

Related

This article is based on some posts I made to mud-dev in 2004. A level based design is assumed to simplify the discussion, but most of the pattern might apply to level-less designs as well.