RMT and other gaming conflicts

[Nekojin]

Okay, seriously, enough of this.

Did I say that every last one of them was just playing WoW?

This is just playing semantic games. If even half of the supposed "millions" of people in the illicit RMT biz were playing WoW, that's still at least 5% of the player base - 5% of each and every server. Do you honestly believe that one out of every twenty people on your server is a Chinese farmer? (And probably a higher proportion of active players at any given time, given that it's asserted that the accounts are always on)

And the industry had over 400-500k employees in China alone as of 2008 and was rapidly growing both as a legit industry and as an undergrown criminal industry. Not to mention prison labour camps. If you had done even cursory research on this topic instead of repeatedly affirming that I'm the one somehow tragically confused while your personal experience is gospel you would know this.

I've done the research. I'm not convinced by the numbers thrown around. They seem extremely hand-wavy and sensationalist. The articles that mention prison camp RMT talk about hundreds of prisoners doing this. It's a pretty big step from hundreds to millions.

Now, consider that when you use the shorthand term RMT, you come up with all sorts of hits, from people talking about gold-selling to people talking about games that sell virtual items for real cash. When blogs and news sites talk about RMT being a billion-dollar industry, they're often dishonestly conflating the two in order to publish Big Scary Numbers. They literally treat a dollar spent buying items in Nexon's Cart Rider game in the same light as someone selling you WoW gold for a buck.

Is it big? Yes. How big? *Handwave* big. You can tell we're serious by the big scary numbers we hand-wave, based on the little information we actually do have.

But seriously, yes, there's a big market. But what a lot of these "exposes" don't tell you is that a great deal of the gold-farming is done in Asian games and/or on Asian servers - gold farming on WoW's Taiwanese and Korean servers is huge.

We'll find out shortly I imagine. I sincerely don't believe Blizzard has all their bases covered for this.

That's not even half an answer. If you think it's going to be "disastrous," surely you have at least some concept of what you think is going to go wrong.

Break-time edit: The biggest problem with all of this is that there are few concrete numbers to work with, and a whole shit-ton of emotional hand-flailing. It doesn't seem like anyone is genuinely studying this scientifically - they get a few points of data, spin it for sensationalist headlines, and off we go!

Like I pointed out earlier, there's a lot of Big Scary Numbers being used in connection with the RMT issue, and a lot of questionable or even outright dishonest cooking of the numbers in order to make the Big Scary Numbers. Game-owned RMT (Nexon's games, for example) is rolled in with legitimate gold-selling (PLEX, etc.) and both are combined with illegitimate RMT to make the illegitimate RMT sound bigger and scarier than it legitimately is. Numbers are given out of context, without any sense of scale or scope - how large is the Asian-server WoW gold-selling market (where gold-selling is considered socially acceptable, even if it's banned in a specific game) compared to the US-server gold-selling market (where it's socially frowned upon), for example? Nobody knows. Nobody seems to be interested in finding out. And so it's all conflated together to make it seem like gold farming is rampant in all games, on all servers. And it only takes a few dedicated spammers and/or botters to make it seem like a huge problem from the players' perspective. One prolific spammer is all it takes to make a chat channel useless (like Diablo 3's General Chat).

[Gravekeeper]

Dude, seriously. You've completely changed the subject rather than answer the point. Again. I gave you the benefit of the doubt the first time but now it seems intentional.

You keep talking like you have authority on the subject, but when pressed reveal you're working from personal observations. Yet when anyone else presents a contrary personal observation, you dimiss it as emotionally compromised. You make sweeping proclamations about the issue, many of which don't hold up to a 30 second Google search, yet when someone else presents a counter thesis its dismissed as "handwaving" or "scapegoating".

At best its coming across as arrogant. At worst condescending. Either way I'm honestly rather tired of it. So congradulations. You "win" by virtue of their being no one left that wants to talk to you. -.-

[Nekojin]

I'm speaking from observation. I see time and time again - people - like you yourself - say, "Gold-sellers ruined the economy." When pressed for details, there's no details forthcoming - you can show the gold-sellers (more or less), you can show the ruined economy (more or less), and you've got a correlation. Great. But correlation is not causation, and zero effort is made to connect the dots. Everyone is willing to blame the scapegoat rather than actually do a little more research.

I'm sorry that you'd rather walk away than take the time to discuss it. I really think you would benefit from reexamining your own biases.

Edit: Part of the reason we seem to be speaking at odds is that there are so many different issues going on here, and conflating them all into one only serves to muddle any attempt to discuss any one facet of it.