Quote:
Originally Posted by webrunner5
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And why is that?? [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.][You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] Tons of people quit playing WoW? EQ Live? I think it has to do with RMT. One day there were 500 people not long ago, now 1,000 people. Duh. |
RMT greatly exaggerates the problem that I was referring to in my post, which is why it's so dangerous to MMO economies. RMT providers do not play a zero-sum game, otherwise there's no point. So they're always selling plat more than they're buying, which means they're supplying plat into the market that isn't being removed. In RL economy terms, this is like the US Fed Reserve dumping tons of new cash into the market which devalues the dollar, only RMT is way more extreme in its effect on plat, IMO.
EVE's solution is to make it pointless to go RMT because you can always buy PLEX (virtual game time cards) for real money, and they're in-game items which can be traded on the in-game market for in-game currency. Easy $$->isk conversion, just like RMT. But the key here is that they're consumable. People buy PLEX because they want to extend their account play time without paying real $$--that's the only reason they have value in-game. So in EVE, this process is zero-sum.