[MUD-Dev] Mapping real money into MUD money

[Matt Mihaly]

On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Alex Chacha wrote:

> Recently I read (on Slashdot) that some MMORPG people were
> thinking about mapping real money into MUD money and possibly vice
> versa.  A MUD or MMORPG would act almost like an arcade where you
> buy tokens to play and can redeem them for real life items (or in
> MUD/MMORPG world possibly relics and super rare items) .

That author doesn't understand what he's talking about, with all due
respect to him. Incidentally, our business model since 1997 has been
based entirely on selling in-game things to players, though we
definitely do not let them get real-world money back out of the
system.

> There are many ways to approach this.  The most important one
> would require a way to add service charge so that the system is
> not lossless (the company running the game would charge a
> percentage for withdrawls and deposits); having people use MMORPG
> as their main source of income may be tricky to design and may
> have legal implications.  However, I am not sure if this has been
> done yet explicitly (not counting the buying and selling of items
> on auction sites).  Would having a way to get money into the game
> by paying for it with real money make sense or will it destabilize
> the economy by the people who have money to burn in real life?
> Would it make sense to allow withdrawls or just allow people to
> "buy" relics and rare items with the money they earned in game?

Selling in-game stuff to people doesn't destabilize the system
anymore than most systems that reward people who have time to burn.

The problems with allowing people to get money back OUT of the
system are legion. Project Entropia tried/is trying it, but they're
so obviously doomed it's not even funny.

Problems include:

  1. Dupe bugs are MUCH more serious when they can cost your company
  real money.

  2. The incentive to commit credit card fraud is absolutely huge if
  the frauders can actually get money back out of the system.

  3. Could turn into a haven for money laundering, which is going to
  cause the game operator problems with government.

That's just a few of the problems.
--matt

Gary Coleman for Governor.
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