The Rabbit Hole - Looking At Snapshots of EVE's PLEX Market

When I began this series, I wanted to maintain a more general look at the role of real money trading in Massively Multi-player Online Games (MOGs) and avoid looking specifically at my main game, EVE Online.  But with the rising popularity of the PLEX model in the industry, no look at RMT is complete without at least one look at CCP's system for exchanging game time for real world cash.  I am engaged in a long term project gathering data related to PLEX, so I figured I would share some of the results of that work today.  I hope everyone likes bar graphs.

The Rabbit Hole: Why The Primary Market Is (Usually) Not So Bad

In the first article of this series, I broke down real money trading in MMOGs between that sponsored by game companies (aka the primary market) and RMT conducted by outside parties (the secondary market).  In the next two articles, I expanded on the theory that real money trading is bad for MMOGs due to the potential to encourage activity that causes (or at least worsens) monetary inflation and the denial of content to the average player.

So far in the series, I don't think I have argued that either primary market RMT is either better or worse than secondary market RMT.  While in the area of gold farmers monopolizing content I concentrated on the illicit gold farmers, that was because the botting in the example game of Elder Scrolls Online was so egregious. One can make the argument that a sizable percentage of the botting in Wildstar was conducted by regular players motivated to play the game for free by purchasing C.R.E.D.D., Carbine's PLEX-like item good for one month's game time, for the game's virtual currency.  And in the article on monetary inflation, the two games that experienced hyper-inflation, Diablo 3 and Gaia Online, both had company-run markets which the developers let run out of control.

The Rabbit Hole: Monopolizing Resouces

This week, I'd like to continue discussing the five reasons why real money trading (RMT)  has negative effects on massively multi-player online games as spelled out in the initial post of the series. In his 2006 paper, "A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Real-Money Trade in the Products of Synthetic Economies", Dr Edward Castronova stated that, "RMT induces gold farmers to occupy territory and system resources."  However, I'd like to modernize the statement a little, to state that real money trading results in gold farming activity that monopolizes content and uses disproportionate amount of game server resources.

The Rabbit Hole: Monetary Inflation

In last week's post, I wrote about the five reasons that real money trading is bad for massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) according to a paper published by Dr. Edward Castronova of Indiana University.  In today's post, I'd like to tackle a subject that even subject matter experts disagree on: does RMT cause monetary inflation in the virtual worlds in online games?

The Rabbit Hole: Why Is RMT Bad?

Over the past 2-3 years, I wrote thousands of words concerning the subject of real money trading in MMORPGs, mainly in EVE Online.  I attempted to write a comprehensive post on the subject of RMT on a few occasions in the past, but much like Lewis Carroll's Alice, I always find myself distracted as I venture down the rabbit hole into the world inhabited by botters, hackers, and gold sellers.  So, instead of a comprehensive work, I decided to write about the subject on Tuesdays.

This initial post in the series will address a topic I have never addressed directly before: why RMT is bad.  But first, I must define the term real money trading.  At the end of 2013, I defined RMT as, at its most basic level, the exchange of virtual goods, including in-game currency, and services for real world currency.  I then, relying on the work of two researchers from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, divided real money trading into a primary and secondary market.