[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] *Starting* Real Currency Based Worlds

[Lachek Butalek]

On 9/16/06, ghovs at plex.nl <ghovs at plex.nl> wrote:
> You don't need to have a stash of gold to cover every single item. Most
> players will first pay a lump of money to go out and try stuff, and by
> the time their in-game currency is depleted, they'll either pay again or
> go play something else. It's uncommon to put in money, instantly make
> more, and demand a withdrawal.

This is true for established MMOs with a playerbase largely interested
in the game aspects of the world. However, if you start an MMO with
the explicit purpose of implementing RMT, you will attract relatively
large quantities of people who are less interested in playing your
game and more interested in making money. "Gold farming" in games
where RMT is against the EULA has reached a very high level of
sophistication despite being "illegal".

Depending on your barrier of entry (i.e. sign-on fee, distribution
channel etc) and the wealth of your game world (i.e. how many
thousands of trees worth $0.01 each) you will have a varying number of
leeches of varying destructive capacities. If your barrier of entry is
low ($5 to sign up, payment by PayPal, online client download, no
limit to number of accounts) and your game world is populated with
wealth at launch (100k+ trees worth a fixed amount of $0.01 each
sellable to NPC vendors) the number of "macro harvesting" characters
would outnumber the number of player characters minimum 10 to 1. Your
game world would be clearcut within days (hours if it was a text-based
MMO rather than a graphical one, since it would be that much easier to
script), your economy would fail, your real players would leave, and
you would be left with a broken game and a big hole in your pocket.