9ball

Anyone who has played an MMO has probably seen these people. The ones sitting in the main town, spamming their heads off about how their goldseller site is the best. Most people ignore them until their goldselling activities start to have an impact on the games economy, driving up prices of items that used to cost chump change. But if everyone hates these companies and their activities, why are they still in business?

It started with a friend giving me a gift of money in the infamous Nexon game of Mabinogi. Previously, this person had been a poor bastard.... he was a good player, but ultimately like myself in that he had no idea how to make money and spent all of his time advancing his skills and worrying about equipment/sundries only when he had ran out or was forced to switch gear.

It turns out he had spent 50$ at a local RMT site, whose name I'm not going to disclose, and gained the equivalent of maybe 3 months of work in currency. I personally was rather distressed that such a player I knew had spent money at an RMT site, but he had given me 10$ in currency so I decided to not berate him about it. After all: I can just claim I didn't know the money was RMT'd

Which comes back to my point. Initially, I had no plans to use any of that money. I already had a dependable set of armor enchanted with rare-ish enchants from the dungeon I usually did. I was actually doing rather well cashing in monster drops, but the time would have come where I would be in the same place as my friend struggling for the money just to get the potions for a dungeon run or to repair my equipment. It wasn't until I got into smithing that this money would ever see any acknowledged use.

Crafting in Mabinogi is one of the hardest grinds one can take up alone. The time it takes in order to get the materials for a single attempt at making in item is at least 2 hours, wrought with random ore drops via mining and a low success rate on refining these ores. Once you get the materials, you may still fail, but even if you succeed, your item is probably only 25% done and now you have to get the materials for another attempt

Or you can do what I did with my newfound wealth and just buy the ingots aand go straight to the anvil.

I had never made a serious attempt at smithing because of the time it took just to make one piece of equipment and how much it really depended on luck whether or not I would be able to level up or not. Once I had money, I found myself burning through ingots at an almost criminal pace, but after my first 300 ingot bundle had ran out I had already gained the experience to rank up twice.

This of course did not mean shit. RAnks go F-A and then 9-1 1 being the master level. I had rank D in a little over an hour of work , instead of a then calculated ~400 hours for mining, refining, and smithing accounting for success rate and how often I can reasonably suspect to fail resulting in more mining and smithing. Is this lazy? Some would say yes. Others would call it a streamline in efficiency, and proof of how specialization yields more rewards in your main skill. I mean, there are plenty of the people in the market right now selling full shops full of ingots for 1~3k a piece depending on the economic mood of the individual selling it. Clearly, they have spent a lot of time refining and gain a good profit on people who only care about smithing. In this case, it doesn't matter where the money going from the smiths to the refiners came from because there are tons of ways to make money outside of crafting. In the end, I believe I found that even on my previous lack-of-wealth if I had just bought ingots in the first place I would have save much more time and effort than money saved doing things from scratch.

I spent a lot of time buying ingots and beating them into equipment I just fed to my bow later. Sometimes if someone needed something made I could offer to do it provided they had materials, which helped ease how much I was putting into basically buying EXP, but I soon got tired of it as I neared the number ranks because of the ridiculous amounts of luck you needed in order to level up at that point. It was also increasingly obvious that my money was indeed limited so I had to find something else to do as this investment would take a lot more time to bear fruit. I didn't want to beg my friend for more money and I didn't have the money to buy gold myself, though at the time that didn't cross my mind. I decided to get back into combat.

Gearing myself proved to be a much better investment. Player smithed armors can sell cheap(as cheap as a low priced genuine Rolex >_>) from a famous smith, as they commonly produce better-than-average pieces(and since player smiths can't guarantee that this will happen except by leveling up to Rank 1,this brings about a boom in demand for the smith). It didn't take much for me to make the badass set at the time, and by this point I had at least 40% of my 'donation' intact and still stored in the bank. Further, feeding my Spirit Bow was easy because gems were common enough to be found in shops, giving me extra boss fighting power

For those who abhorrently oppose goldselling, your brains must be exploding right now. But honestly, I have never had more fun with an MMO as I did with Mabinogi when I had money, and you'll be hard pressed to find someone that disagrees after having it. Games that support RMT, or rather, allow you to buy and sell currency right from them have social classes like the real world, except without all the social barriers that we as humans have worked up. In fact, you'll find people wanting to SPEND MONEY in order to get people into the same game as them just to have friends to play with. Socially, RMT is a great thing. Recreationally, RMT is a great thing.

And thats my point. We all want RMT to go away because it causes inflation to those who play the game within the terms of service, however, I personally feel it's impossible to eliminate RMT by design. Runescape went as far as to mandate that all trades must be completely balanced. What did the RMT sites do? They eliminated their goldselling departments and now offer to goldfarm you the amounts of gold that they would have just given you instantly in the past. And you know what? THEY STILL MAKE MONEY

What can be done? Game publishers, PAY FUCKING ATTENTION. Take logs, have someone read them by chat type every day and watch for RMT. Have a GM placed everywhere at all times watching for advertisements. Check out the play history of players who give people massive amounts of money without saying a word. YOU CAN DO ALL OF THIS WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE ANYTHING. I say it's not the people who buy gold that are being lazy, it's the game developers and publishers who are not taking enough of a stand in order to prevent RMT. I personally liked FFXI's approach when they banned all those accounts and were able to eliminate billions of gold from the system, but it came too late and the damage had already been done. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, but developers NEVER take that prevention seriously when coding the game.