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EVE ONLINE IS AN RMT GAME ENDORSED BY CCP DONT LET THEM TELL YOU OTHERWISE!
In a recently released interview of CCP it was stated by CCP that EVE online will never implement a Real money trade revenue model to EVE online as it does not fit. THIS IS A LIE!
Almost a year ago CCP introduced a new scheme into EVE, this scheme allows players to buy EVE gametime codes from CCP and sell them to other players ingame for ingame money known as ISK.
Example, you pay $40 and you will be given a code from CCP, this code is a 90 day gameplay time code, you use it on a game account and that account is credited with 90 days of playing EVE online.
CCP have allowed now for quite some time players to sell these gametime codes to other players for ingame money, effectively allowing players to buy isk with real money. Player A buys a gametime code for $40 and sells the gametime code to Player B for ingame currency (about 330 million isk). In some cases, a more accurate example to what is actually happening is Player A spends $1000 dollars and buys 25 of these timecodes which he then sells to numerous other players for a sum of many billions of ingame isk.
In the interview here: http://virtual-economy.org/blog/interview_with_ccp_eve_currenc Magnus of CCP claims CCP would never allow something like this to happen, when the simple truth is it DOES happen and CCP actually endorse it, if you are scammed by another player, for instance, a player claims to be selling timecodes and you send him isk and he doesn't supply you with a working code, then the offending player will be banned from EVE online and the victim will have his isk returned to him. This system is of course massively abused in ways which i will not even go into.
Some players have sold literally 100s of these timecodes, it's much worse than just a player selling a timecode to make some isk, you have players spending massive sums of money to buy these timecodes with the pure intention of selling them for isk. IT'S BUYING ISK WITH REAL MONEY NO MATTER WHICH WAY YOU LOOK AT IT!
The reason CCP allow this to go on? Because players who have a lot of isk will make more game accounts, and any EVE player knows that the more game accounts you have, the more isk you can make. The only reason EVE online has had such a rapid subscription number increase in the past year is because the average EVE player has at minimum 2 accounts, many players have many more.
The real issue here is that CCP allow players to buy their way through the game with real world wealth, yet in interviews and to new players, it's all denied that this ever goes on. CCP need to make it very public what they are doing here, it's not going to be good for them in the long run when everybody eventually finds out what they have been hiding from all except the already subscribed and already addicted EVE players.
If you had never played EVE online before, but were planning to, and then heard about this, would you still play? I know i wouldn't!
P.S - Anyone who plans to interview anyone from CCP, ask them some questions about the Gametime code for isk situation, lets see what they have to say.
Comments
"A ship-of-war is the best ambassador." - Oliver Cromwell
I forgot to add something.
The timecard situation works both ways, you can also use your isk ingame to buy timecodes from people that were looking to buy some isk, then you can sell those timecodes to other people in the real world for real money, at a slightly reduced rate to encourage people who are looking to save money to buy from you instead of from ccp.
Example: Player A agrees to buy a 5 lots of 90 day timecodes from Player B for 1.7 billion isk, Player A then sells these timecodes on his own website or on ebay for slightly less than the offical price that CCP are charging, The timecodes will sell because people looking to save some money will buy the codes from him. Player A could sell each code for 30-35 dollars, which is 5-10 dollars cheaper the offical price, 5* 30+ dollars is more than 150 dollars.
Player A just sold his 1.7 billion isk for over 150 dollars.
EVE isn't an RMT game? Yeah, right.
I agree with the original poster to a certain degree - the fact that the devs talk about how they're all anti-RMT and then have the GTC-for-isk thing going on is rather hypocritical, and I'd like to hear the EVE devs comment on the entire situation. The original poster doesn't even mention the reselling of GTC codes bought with isk on eBay, either - it converts wealth both ways.
Of all the ways the GTC-for-isk system is being exploited, I think the best one is exemplified in the case of a certain large player alliance:
#1: They recruit people from a certain large, pre-established online community into the game using the EVE affiliates program, which gives them around $7 or so for each new account established through their referral.
#2: At the same time, they strongly encourage all of their members to pay for their accounts using game time cards purchased through certain online vendors - these vendors also offer them affiliate schemes, something to the tune of a dollar or two for each GTC purchased.
#3: The money raised here is reinvested in even more GTCs.
#4: The GTCs are now sold for isk to other players, resulting in an alliance whose economic infrastructure exists almost entirely outside of the game.
Suffice to say, this is a severely destabilizing & exploitative practice, even though all the constituent steps are entirely acceptable by the EVE Terms of Service.
Hmm You are getting on a very touchy subject here. Right now there are many problems with the selling of GTC for ISK (eve currency) and CCP knows this. They have made statements on their forums that they didnt thoroughly think out the GTC trade and because of this they are having lots of problems.
Whether GameTime Card selling is the same as RMT is a grey area. Its not black and white like farming then selling the ISK on ebay. When selling GTC you are providing a service to someone which they in turn buy from you for in-game money. What CCP has done is let the game economy bleed over into the real world which, IMHO, is a bad thing. I personally think CCP will eventualy stop supporting GTC trading OR develop a better method to ensure their EULA isnt broken. As for the interview, I will agree with what Magnus has said. As per wikipedia, RMT is the process of aquiring large amounts of in-game currency and then selling it for RL currency on a site like ebay. GTC trading is different as the seller is providing a service.
intended use of GTC trade then it can very well become RMT. Hence
I said CCP needs to develop a better way of handling GTC trading.
EDIT: btw I dont support GTC trading at all.
You are wrong Bigdave, Gametime cards sold for isk is exactly the same as ebay rmting. Where do you think the isk comes from that players are using to pay for their accounts? They had to farm it. Where did the Gametime code come from? It was purchased for real money.
It's exactly the same as ebay farming, isk is traded for real money, the only difference is, ccp are getting the profit. Players are encouraged to farm isk and players are encouraged to spend out real money to buy their way through EVE now that CCP have allowed it.
The entire GTC system allows a person to trade both ways, you can either trade isk for money, or money for isk, the isk buyers are getting what they want, isk bought without fear of being banned. The isk sellers are getting want they want, they can sell their isk by purchasing Gametime codes with isk and then re-selling the codes for real money, without fear of being banned.
This can go in cycles, Player A spends 1.7 bill isk on 5 timecodes, he then sells those timecodes on ebay at a reduced rate, Mr iskbuyer then buys these timecodes on ebay for $150 and sells them for isk all over again, Player A buys them of him yet again for another 1.7 billion isk. What has happend here? Isk/Real money is being traded over and over in a cycle. The timecodes themselves may never even get used, they may even be fake codes, but as long as they keep getting traded between people with an exchange of isk and real life money, who would ever know? The prime fact here is that it's a new form of ebaying isk and CCP endorse it.
How can you argue that it's selling a service?
You pay $40 for a 90 day timecode, you sell it on the forums for 330 million isk. What part of the service did you provide? None, CCP provide the service, you just bought 330 million isk for 40 dollars.
my my opinions to small minded people who can only look at something
one way, their way. Im done with this topic.
Let me give you a reality check DannieBoy. CCP is a corporation. What do corporations want to do? Make money. Now if you sell your isk through a 3rd party like eBay, CCP is not getting any money. If another player buys a timecode from CCP, CCP gets their $15 or $40. What goes on with that timecode after that doesnt matter much. They also dont endorse selling that timecode, because someone will be exploiting their product for personal benefits, which every other corporation doesnt like. Its kinda like ripping music, and selling that CD to others, The company isnt getting the money for their product, and that would piss me off also.
fan of GTC for ISK sales. However, after reading all your whining I feel they
should keep it - just to keep you all hot and bothered, if it pisess you off,
they should keep it, maybe you will get an ulcer or something from worrying
about what Oveur is thinking.
So, I DONT GIVE A RAT'S ARSE.
Lets see first off all GTC's were introduced as a means of paying your subscription or as a way of a poor person who cant afford the subsciption to pay off that subsciption by buying that timecode for isk.
Now when its like this timecodes are ok but unfortunatly like any system some people have found ways to distort things.
Should timecodes go? no they do have a good reason to exist.
Is there a problem with them? Sadly there is.
Should the developers find a way to fix it? Of course and according to recent rumours from the devs they have a solution in the works but are keeping there mouths shut on specifics.
In short watch this space.
I support RMT, as long as it doesn't effect the game.
GTC selling for ISK doesn't effect the game one bit. You can be rest asured that if it was ever exploited to the point where it effected the game adversly, that CCP would totally be opposed to it because the fact remains:
CCP is one of the few MMORPG Devs in the world that actually CARES about the game and gameplay of their game... rather than the money they are getting from it.
And if anyone quotes me and says some backwoods hick bullshit about how they wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't for money is a fucking moron. (it's happend before) Of course they are doing it for money, but they are doing it for money the same way an artist does it for money... they are getting enjoyment out of it and if you can become rich and get enjoyment out of that which is making you rich then you are truely the luckiest person in the world.
A Work in Progress.
Add Me
"A ship-of-war is the best ambassador." - Oliver Cromwell
Easy fix: 3 GTCs/mo Per ACCOUNT, IP to game login controlled.
I didn't know it was effecting the game as much as you stated though. It doesn't effect my corp/alliance area, so you're right on that.
A Work in Progress.
Add Me
- EVE has a large, active and fairly stable ingame economy, which makes it attractive to player who want to try and make real money off of it.
- Since this is the case, they will try whatever is possible to trade ingame currency (ISK) for real money with other players with real money who want to get ahead fast.
- If CCP 'legalizes' trade of GTC for ISK, chances are a lot of these traders willl switch to trading GTC instead of real currency.
The good thing about that is that CCP can more or less track how frequent this is and make some money on the side. Not a very big good thing, but that's about all the good I see about it. Effectively, CCP is issuing stock at a fixed rate and then the market for ISK determines what the price in real currency on the GTC market will be (it will always be below the rate at which they are issued though).
The bad things are many:
- There's no guarantee all ISK traders switch to GTC. In fact, it would seem that most don't and that some other players who would never get into RMT without this deal -are- getting into the GTC trade.
- The switch to GTC does nothing to actually stop the trade of ingame currency for real currency.
- With GTCs as an inbetween currency, they actually might actually get piled up and real life retailers are risking a loss if they buy GTCs to sell to their customers, since they will be overpriced by the time CCP does break GTC trading and all of the GTCs will end up in the bargain bin.
The bottomline is that if CCP truly wants to stop RMT, they would do best to stop legal GTC trading right now. That doesn't mean cancelling the GTC program. It just means rewording the EULA, making it clear that trading for GTC's isn't legal either. Because if they really do want to stop RMT, by the time they succeed they will have to cancel the possibility for GTC trading anyway, for reasons made perfectly clear by the posters above.
Greetings,
Grismar.
Actually grismaqr, you are msising a few points about the GTC for isk deal.
Your analisys is headed the right way, but you're missing a bit of info.
For example. Compare the price in USD of one million isk a year ago with that now.
Then, compare the price at IGE/Ebay with the price in USD when counted in gametime.
Lastly, look up how many re-sellers of gamteimecodes you can find on ebay (and with resellers I mean sellers of GTC's that are semi-pro and not official retailers).
What you might find is that ISK has grown incredibly cheap due to the GTC market evolving, that ISK is actually cheaper when you use GTC's to get it rather then when you buy it at IGE, and that there are hardly any of any at all GTC's being resold for conversion into USD again.
If you look at the GTC mechanic carefully, you shoudl notice that it's simply an alternative and semi-closed economy that has been allowed with the purpose of competing withthe professional farmer community for the same market. The fun aprt is that everything points to the GTC mechanic winning.
I came up with this theory that CCP has this in mind a while back. You can read it on Eve-O here:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=253228
What Magnus said in the recent interview points to further development of this system by CCP. And personally, knwoing the RMT-free games have been proven impossible, I would settle for a system that limits the damage that the professional farmers do to both game publsihers and economies. If that means that the RL philosphy of time-money and money=power enter the game world (which they already have anyway, I doubt more isk is being "bought" now then there was before), then that price could well be worth it.
Also, CCP are making butloads of money here, not just a bit. Of those 150K accounts out now, at least 20K if not more wouldnt be here without GTC trading. That's alot of money that now goes to CCP, while it used to go to IGE.
As for the op, what magnus meant with his remark about CCP not adopting an RMT policy probably referred to systems like the auction houses or those in use by other puiblishers that are meant to make the company money, rather then to exert some control over the RMT that invariably goes on in all MMO's.
It becomes even more annoying if you don't know who the person is who got his isk unfairly and who actually played for it. People will compliment "hard workers" in the game and someone who manages to get a rare battleship kitted out with all sorts of rare mods he's collected deserves some admiration and possibly respect. That's part of what makes it worthwhile. If people go on eBay and get the same treatment ingame, that detracts from everyone's fun.
But that's not the biggest problem. If RMT becomes common, prices will drop. It's a matter of supply and demand. There's going to be demand for it, you know there will. And if it goes from "not so legal" to "go right ahead", supply will rise, prices will drop and you -will- be able to buy game-changing goods with dollars. Right now, you'll pay $100 just for a decently outfitted battleship that will be hard to kill but will go down eventually. What if you can buy a pair of carriers for that? Or an Outpost? Or, perish the thought, a Titan?
It all depends on CCP keeping inflation ingame in check and working as hard as they can afford to keep real money out of their economy. They're doing pretty good as it stands and the whole GTC-thing (again, not the existance of GTCs, but the fact that they allow trading them for isk) is just a strange abberation that they had best remedy soon.
People can play EVE for free, and you're knocking it? It's basically a free game for me, i haven't paid with real money in months.
There's two sides to every story, and you're staying on one side crying about the fact that someone is making virtual money from real money! VIRTUAL MONEY! Who cares? Idiots that are jealous about someone, or something that's happening in game, that's who. Don't like it? Don't play, don't cry and piss off.
-iCeh
Actually Grismar, you're worng again.
If RMT becomes mroe acceptable and people start buying more isk, then assuming a steady supply of isk or one that doesn't grow along witht he demand (lack of acceptance of RMT doesn't seem to affect the amount of people using GTC's to pay for extra accounts, does it ?), will mean that your 100 USD willl get you LESS rather then more as RMT increases.
At the moment, each day of gameplay time gets you 3-5m isk. If the amount of gametime on offer rises, you'll get less untill enough people started using gtc's to pay for their accounts to pick up the slack again.
Secondly, if a large amount of people use bought isk to pay for in-game goodies on the ingame market then those goodies get destroyed eventually, while the isk that bought them has most likely moved to the wallets of people that are not into RMT, giving them more isk to sell to those that want to buy it. In the end, those RMT-ing players could become responsible for funding the increased ingame success of the rest, along with of instead of their own.
However, in more practicla terms I can't but despise the goonswarm mechanism of using GTC"s to fund alliance pos-spamming too. It's simply an affront to your sense of correctness.
I don't however doubt for a moment that they would do that regardless of wether or not CCP decide to crack down on GTC sales. IGE sells isk, and if that's where they need to get it then they will.
I realy dont see the point of making this post
We who play close to the dev team and the owners of ccp
alredy know its a balance in this matter.
Guides & Trials for EvE Online:
First of all... Let's put it in a perspective where you have a well
runned Guild or Corp. I'll take my SWG guild for example... We were so
huge and well organised that we actually had a real guild bank account
with real money. The money was for our vent servers, forums, FTP and
such... we also had a reserves of gamecards for our members. You always
that month of the year where life is hard and money is short...
(adverage people with adverage salaries)
Our guild supported the players and was selling gamecards for guild
work or in-game credits. We didn't actually make a profit or anything
but just our city costed 8.5 millions credits per week. Asking 500K
from a member that couldn't pay for a gamecard was more then fair.
The same applies for EVE, not everyone has the money to pay a constant
15$ per month. In return, they found a way to keep their subscription
up by giving some of their time to other players that have the money.
If you really really take the moment to think about it, it's not a big
deal and heck, it's keeping the community alive. The danger of this is
exageration but that's a reality for any situation in life.
I could drag this post for a long time but let's not
take a moment to see the good and the bad about this. If you were in a
situation where you're too poor to pay for a month, what would you do ?
Ask your friend to lend you 15$?
Ask a guildmate to buy you a month?
Work in-game to get some ISK and then get a gamecard from a richer player?
Obviously, I see it the other way around.
You're lazy or you don't have the time to make some ISK but you are rich in RL or whatever... YOu can do the following:
- IGE (They make a profit out of it)
- Buy some timecodes and seek players that are in need of one.
- Be a pirate and force players to give you some ISK.
- Become a Bounty and hunt players down for ISK.
- Transform your wife and kid into a bot so they can run missions for you ??????!!!?!?!?!?!?
- Beg for ISK on the chat channels ?
Now... you mention one thing: a player that buys 1000$ worth of
timecodes to then sell them in-game for ISK. If I was CCP, I wouldn't
do or couldn"t much about it lol.. THink about it, you just gave me
1000$ and thanks to you, at least 5 players are still playing today.
Keep in mind, there is a huge difference between a player buying ISK from IGE and a player that trade timecodes for ISK.
The definition of endorse is to approve, support, or sustain. Nowhere did CCP say they approve, support, nor are actively sustaining the selling of timecards for isk. Thus, your entire argument has no merit behind it.