Friday, October 25, 2013

EVE Online: GTC referrals and RMT

Yay finally I joined in and made my own post about the SOMER RMT questions.

The real issue is that ingame parties can refer players to GTC sellers and get a share of the profits.

The real question is whether or not offering isk as a reward for using your referral is considered illegal RMT.

Instead of SOMER you could also Goons. They orchestrate ingame events and activities so they can generate articles on themittani.com. TMC.com refers people to a GTC seller. TMC generates dollars from this.
Perfectly legal so far.

Now TMC decides to offer 50m isk bonus for any GTC bought through their website to entice even more players to click on their GTC referral link.
Suddenly RMT.

But there is Good RMT and there is Bad RMT.
-Bad RMT: you pay 20 dollars and get 1 billion isk.
-Good RMT: you pay 20 dollars to buy a GTC and get 50m bonus.

Of those 20 Good RMT dollars:
-CCP gets 15 dollar (same as if someone had paid to extend their account one week.)
-GTC reseller gets 3 dollar.
-TMC gets 1 dollar.

With Bad RMT the isk seller gets 20 dollars per billion isk and CCP sees none.
With Good RMT the isk seller gets 20 dollars per billion isk and CCP gets 300 dollars.

Imagine CCP allows this and every big alliance and RMT traders jumps in.
Soon referrers will have to offer 200m isk bonus per GTC to get players to click their link instead of going to a competitor. With Good RMT the isk seller then gets 5 dollars per billion isk and CCP still gets their 300 dollars for selling 20 GTC to a third party reseller.

Who loses if this is allowed?

The limit on how much isk you can convert to dollars is just on how much people you can get to click the referral links. But let's say people are lining up to buy GTC through your referral and the limit is only in how fast you can pull in isk to hand out as bonus.

To earn isk you have to play the game. To play the game you need account time. CCP earns 15 dollars if you pay for that account time (if you plex someone else already paid for your account time).

CCP is not the loser here, someone pays for that GTC.
The GTC seller is not the loser here, he sold a GTC
The referrer is not the loser here, he just plexed his account.
The player that wants isk is not the loser here. He is not forced to buy a GTC.

Of course botting to earn inhuman amounts of isk would break this.
That is why botting is illegal and should be a high priority for CCP to combat.

What if the CFC turns into a human botting alliance focusing on pure PVE?
Then there are a lot of PVE carebears making themselves a big target for any PVP-ers.

What if you can't fight the CFC because they are too big?
Well obviously goons have won at EVE. Now HTFU and go fight goons, join goons or get the fuck out of this game you pathetic whiner.

Personally I have no idea yet what I will do, but quitting EVE is not an option under consideration.

3 comments:

  1. Telling people to get the fuck out of the game if they disagree with me is not polite, my apologies.

    If you think all RMT is evil please explain how you feel about PLEX.

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  2. By allowing players to "cash out" you fundamentally change the nature of the game. Motivations change from those of a competitive game to a business enterprise.

    With plex purchased from CCP you are "cashing into" Eve and your money is going to both other players by helping them maintain a subscription (improving current content) and CCP (keeping the lights on and future content).

    With "cash out" everything changes. The most damaging aspect of illegal RMT is that it imposes the real money profit motive of people who are not truly invested in playing game onto those that are spending their money for the fun of playing the game.

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  3. Seems to me the only real solution is do ban GTC selling and third party involvement? That removes the option to cash out and nothing else as far as I can tell.

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