A long time ago the popular MMORPG, Runescape, allowed players to trade items and money freely with one another. In addition to trading items freely, if you managed to kill another player in player vs player (PvP) areas of Runescape, you would recieve the items they were carrying when they died. This system allowed for an extremely fun and competitive game, where players profited big from killing other players. This system also allowed players to experience a much greater adrenaline rush, as compared to other MMORPGs that don't allow players to recieve loot from each other. The problem with many MMORPGs is they dont have this competitive aspect of the game, thus making their games boring over time (unless they have a TON of quest/skill content). However, many players took advantage of this system to sell the money/items they made when playing the game for real world currency. This system became so profitable that players began writing software that played the game for them in order to accumulate money in the game. According to the company that created Runescape (Jagex), "sweatshops" even started up in Asia that played the game only to accumulate money and sell it for Real world currency. These "sweatshops" would use stolen credit cards to purchase memberships to the play the game, and inevitably their payments would get charged back and Jagex would also be charged a fee. This became so bad that Jagex had to remove all forms of trading freely with other players and recieving loot from killing other players. If Jagex hadn't of implimented these restrictions they would have risked going out of business (according to their statements). By implimenting these restrictions Jagex successfully reduced the problem, but in turn also took away one of the most appealing aspects of the game. So my questions arise. Is there any possible system an MMORPG could use where players would be able to freely recieve loot from one another, but not have to worry about "sweatshops" or macroing programs infesting the game? According the Jagex, the main problems were the fees associated with charging back stolen credit cards. So could a possible solution to this problem be not charging a membership fee to play the game? Instead, impliment some other system to make money from players? (Example: sell special untradeable items from the game website to players, or allow paying players to become a special race of characters) Also, macroing programs that played the game for people were a major problem. What would be good solutions to prevent programs that play the game for people?

Hi, do you mean that the fun you get from PvP is more on selling your loots to other players instead of selling your loots to the in-game vendors?

How do bots make money in game? It seems that if money is hard to make by non-skilled players then the problem could be reduced. (It won't go away since you have mentioned that the "bots" are people.)

If the method to make money is competitive in nature (e.g. pvp) then a sweatshop of "bots" would need to be a sweatshop of gladiators with the aim to non-sweatshop players to make money (to loot their money). But that is good for business because now you have a battle field of human players trying to win.

So a model of solution might have these components:

1) The player can only trade anything using an in-game auction system
2) The currency to work with the auction system is game money
3) Game money can only be obtained by selling loots they got from PvP
4) Players who enter PvP cannot select their targets. The game would do the matching.

For Rule 1, see this post on the concept of suppressing discrimination of location, currency, and time of trade using a forced open-market as the sole channel of commerce.

Rule 4 is implemented to suppress discrimination of PvP target, such that a sweatshop cannot easily loot among their own characters without a risk losing their stuff to legit players.

Human Player Monsters Model:

Allow players to sign up to play the game free of charge as a Monster. A monster can level up to go to different areas once they got experiences. Monsters can only attack player characters. When they attack a player, they earn game money. Monsters cannot buy anything. But monster player with game money can still give money to normal players. They cannot receive anything in return.

This way, sweatshops would operate to take the roles of the monsters. Sweatshops would sell the money they got to players. The Game Company effectively "Hires" the sweatshops to play the monsters for them.

Monsters cannot be revived. When they die, they get looted by players. The monster-player player is respawned at the "Monster Den", and the game teleports that Monster Soul to a monster when a player engages a monster.

The Monster Player does not choose its target.

The player selects the target, and it could just happen that the target is in fact controlled by a human. Monster players cannot roam about the world, they are only put into action when a player aggros a monster.

Inside the Monster Den, the player of monster soul waits for its summon to play the monster type it wants. The player could select a range of monster types that he had earned enough credits to play, and could set a preference.

I think that in this system, a normal player would play a monster to earn money for his Hero character, because it might be easier to get money as a monster (A monster does not lose its money when it dies). The point here is that if someone tries to use a bot to kill mobs, sometimes the mob is not a bot.

Suppose you are a Hero player and also a monster player, and you see an area infested with Hero Bots, you could then use your monster side to play the monster to kill the bots to earn money. Perhaps if you are a high level Monster player, the game would let you spawn as a Monster Elite Hero. Once you got spawned, you could walk to the bot and pwn it. Normal human players could see your graphics that you are an Avenger Monster, and could walk away, but bots might not be able to tell the difference.

[Edited by - Wai on March 29, 2009 1:54:55 AM]

I think the root of this problem is the time requirement to achieve a level of equality being too high. More specifically, I think the entertainment value of the time is too low.

Anyone who has studied the phenomenon of game asset-selling quickly concludes that a large portion of selling is motivated by people who feel they would gain a better entertainment value from their money than their time. It is often said that people who buy assets "have more money than time." Generally, it is true that the people who buy items are people who have more money than time, but not always. What is true in almost every circumstance is that they feel their time investment to acquire game assets will not give them a greater entertainment value than spending some amount of money on the same assets will. So they opt to spend the money. The demand for this service is the root problem. Looking at the history of MUDs and MMOs, the demand for characters and items came first. This is not a case of chicken or egg. Services to supply the demand rose as the market for MMOs grew. There are games where the demand for asset-services is slim to none. This shows us that it is possible to mitigate the demand for services through game design.

This is going to be a challenge for designers. Traditional mass market games have shown a very simple method for garnering addicted customers. They use items, legends and assets as positive feedback to give players a sense of satisfaction with little effort. This is a very quick, simple and universal way to make players feel good, and players that feel good will pay for another month.

Instead, I suggest designs that focus rewards on content creation, rather than content consumption. The easiest way to achieve this is through community activity. In the MMO Dark Ages, players can join several established religions, hold mass, lead prayer events, rise through the ranks of the priesthood. Or they can run for several political offices and take part in debates, creating town laws, political infighting and backstabbing. Other community engagements exist as well, such as giving lectures at the university, establishing a guild, or joining the knighthood. Item buying exists in Dark Ages, but it is very minimal. Gathering items and experience is only a small part of the game experience in Dark Ages.
Another example is the MMO ShadowBane. Players could band together to form guilds which built and defended cities, sieged other cities, formed alliances to defend or attack other guild's cities. The most powerful items were built in these cities, and there was no time commitment to creating them (Note: It took time, but it didn't require any player to be present, so no player's time was invested). Item selling was also rare in ShadowBane, as the majority of rewards came from the community actions of building, organizing and seiging.

I think asset selling is a natural reaction to simple games, with little depth other than asset acquisition, in the free market. I think that attempts to mitigate the problem through policy will have negligible, or only short-term effect, and will ultimately serve to only reduce the profitability of the game. Instead, the only magic bullet for this problem is to design a game where the meat of the game is creating content for other players through community action.