If all of the important items are non-transferable or “soul-bound”, then all that remains to trade is stuff that people aren’t that interested in, and all the fun of trading is removed. Of course, the problem with this strategy is that you are only able to solve real-money trading by exactly the amount that you are removing the fun and interesting aspects of trading. In more extreme cases, the developers will simply remove all transferability for the items by making them “soul-bound” or otherwise not tradable. This eliminated a whole class of gameplay for players who liked to do arbitrage and prevented players from gifting their friends items. One example of such an attempt to restrict free-trade was when asymmetrically valued trades were disallowed in Runescape 2. This of course not only restricts the behavior of RMTers but also the behavior of all players who enjoyed the free-trade aspect of the game and all of the liveliness that it brings to the world. Once game developers realize the futility of policing RMT, they begin to restrict trade within their games. Developers can of course try to outlaw real-money trading and ban players who do it, but the fact of the matter is that there is not a single MMORPG with any amount of free trade that has escaped this absolute inevitability, even ones with limited free trade. Not only that, but you place an enormous moderation burden on the company and enable the creation of entire industries focused around gold-farming to meet the demand of players. Much like Prohibition in the United States, you end up trying to thimble out the Titanic. What all game developers find is that as their game becomes more popular, RMT becomes rampant in the game and almost impossible to ban away. The typical pattern you see with game developers is that they initially design the game with quite an open free-trade system along with a policy stating that RMT is forbidden and that accounts will be banned for RMT. Sell tradeable items directly to players for real-money to undercut RMTers There are really only three strategies that game designers have to fight this: The point of this post is to discuss how to grapple with this inevitable phenomenon. This behavior is not a mere possibility, it is a direct and necessary consequence of allowing players to transfer things between each other. For example, I send another player cash in real life, and then they initiate a trade in-game where they give me the items I want. (1) If a game designer enables transfers of in-game items between players, the game designer will inevitably find players attempting to use actual money (a valuable currency outside of the game) to buy the items they want from other players. It’s a basic human tendency for people to try to acquire the things they want, with whatever means they have available to them. While free-trade enables fun gameplay around setting prices, bartering, moving goods, and trading items, it also comes with game design challenges, namely real-money trading (RMT). It requires, in general, that items are not restricted from trade, “soul-bound”, or otherwise tied specifically to your character. ![]() Free trade requires that you are able to sell any item in a game to anyone for whatever price. It is (or used to be) a very common feature for massively-multiplayer online role-playing games to have. We also carve out areas of the game which involve non-transferrable things and are thus protected from being pay-to-win as best as we are able.įree-trade is the ability for people to exchange goods and services with each other without hindrance or restriction. ![]() Rather than fight this, ignore this, or live in denial of this, BitCraft is designed and balanced with this in mind. Therefore irrespective of what we, the game designers, want it’s inescapable that players in BitCraft will trade items for real-money. ![]() Real-money trading necessarily makes part of the game in some sense pay-to-winįree trade is inherent to the vision of BitCraft and will constitute a big part of the game The point of this article is to present four key points which I believe are crucial to the design of BitCraft.Īll games with free-trade (particularly MMOs) cannot escape real-money trading (aka RMT) I’d like to talk about a game design topic which has long been a point of frequent, deep discussion and differing opinions within Clockwork Labs: free trade and its many implications.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |