The RMT fallacy

General Discussion General Discussion
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Ahh yes. Real money transactions. Around here we use it to describe anybody who buys currency from gold sellers, but NOT people who buy it directly from Lost Ark. The irony, of course, is that buying crystals > gold from the Lost Ark in-game store is a real money transaction too.

Disclaimer/TL;DR

1 - I’m not defending players who buy from gold sellers and/or break TOS. It has a negative effect on the in-game economy.
2 - There is no TLDR. Don’t be lazy. Read the freaking post before you reply. Thanks.

Let me just get this part out of the way first: Some people think gold sellers and RMTers are bad, for ethical, legal, economic, or several other reasons. Other players don’t have a problem with it. I’m not here to discuss the ethical reasons about it.

Pricing

If there’s one thing I do know, people generally will buy the same item at a lower price if given a choice. That’s just kind of common sense. Not everybody’s willing to buy a TV out of the back of some dudes van, thankfully, but seriously… Walmart/Sam’s Club is the U.S.'s number one brick and mortar chain for a reason, and it’s 99.97% about pricing. Anyway…

Blaming ‘RMT’ players as a primary reason for why the market is so shitty really doesn’t make sense to me because it doesn’t address the root cause. It’s like… Nobody ever died of a cough, right? The cough is just a symptom. The cause of the cough is pneumonia. If RTM’ers are the cough, bots and gold sellers are pneumonia, and AGS’ inability to stop bots and gold sellers, control the in-game market, and reduce inflation… Well that is just lung cancer.

MMOs live and die by their in-game economies, and AGS has done absolutely nothing effective to protect the one in Lost Ark.

Therefore, banning RMT’ers will have little to no effect whatsoever on the bad economy, IMO. Banning them will only accomplish the one thing Smilegate and Amazon can’t afford right now, and that’s to eliminate actual human players. Why? Because actual human players are still potential customers. This is important for several reasons, let me explain:

  1. Several lost ark streamers on YouTube and independent gaming websites have pointed out that the actual human player base is only 20 to 40% of the numbers listed on the concurrent player list. I think they are right.
  2. The rest are bots.
  3. Only 20% of 800,000 are actual players… That’s a far cry from being a stable and popular game.
  4. It also means there are significantly less potential customers in the revenue stream for AGS.

The entire game is designed to make you want to buy more gold or blue crystals. Pheons, honing costs, needing 12 different currencies, the list goes on and on for how or why you would want to buy gold. Gold sellers have cut the legs out from underneath AGS’ revenue stream and there’s nothing they can do about it.

Predatory

A lot of people call this entire model predatory. It is a system designed to make you want to pay to win, or at least pay to progress. Yet despite stacking all of the economic cards in their own favor, AGS has allowed third party gold sellers to hijack a major portion of their revenue stream. Buying gold from a third party is orders of magnitude cheaper than buying it from the legitimate store! For that reason alone you would think AGS would do something far more drastic about the bots. That they are unable to do so screams complete incompetence to me.

So…

What I think the community needs to do is blame the people who released a badly implemented game. Lost Ark is the most insecure, bot friendly game I have ever seen. If there’s one thing we’re continually being told by the CMs on the forum is that they [the devs] don’t have the tools or resources to successfully remove bots from the game. How or why you would choose to publish a game in a state like that is completely beyond me. Releasing a product with out being able to control the revenue stream? In any other industry, you would be laughed out of corporate boardrooms for such an idea. Career killer.

Gizmos analogy

Here is an analogy for you… Let’s say you wanted to start a business selling gizmos. A 24/7/365 Gizmo Super Emporium. So let’s just say you go out into a giant parking lot, pitch a bunch of giant tents, arrange all your fancy gizmos on tables, then hire ONE checkout clerk to run the entire store for 8 hours a day. No physical walls, no security guards, no clerk for the other 16 hours, no cameras to watch over the gizmos… Should you really be surprised that most of your gizmos just up and walked away? Should you be surprised that you are not making money? Are you stunned that people are selling your gizmos in their own stores for less? Amazon is dumb. That’s basically the method by which Amazon published Lost Ark. No walls, no security guards, no cameras or significant staff at all.

Now, if I were an AGS executive who was answerable to Bezos and/or shareholders, I would be having several aneurysms every single day over why 80% of my population in the game is scrips and bots. Bots who are circumventing/hijacking my only source of cash flow. I would be on the phone to the Smilegate developers on a daily - if not hourly - basis, demanding to know where the bot issue fix is and why it’s taking so long. If I were a shareholder, I would be filing complaints to the board about AGS executives’ mismanagement. And if I were Amazon, I’d be seriously considering suing EasyCheat and Smilegate for lost income from their complete failure in being able to address the issue.

But I’m not a shareholder, and I’m not an executive, I’m just a player. A player who’s going to speak with my wallet, and stop playing the game altogether. It’s already been 5 days since I last logged on. Or should I say more accurately, it’s been weeks since I’ve been faced with a reasonable login queue time, and I refuse to play a game so infested with bots that it takes me two hours to get to a character screen, just to farm endlessly on 9 alt characters, just so that I can pay 1,500 gold in pheons so that I can buy a 200 gold necklace.

The insanity of this game is immense.

(Original post edited to remove offensive content.)

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Well, purpose of an analogy is NOT to be perfect, only to get a point across. The point is, when faced with buying the exact same product, people will choose the cheaper price. I think my analogy does that.

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TL:DR

But from what I read if you are comparing giving money to bot buyers the same as legit through the game to support it then you are pretty dumb.

The game remains free to play because people swipe legit and support the game.

People who RMT don’t support the game besides being content for people who swipe legit impacting the real overall in-game economy by buying items at any price ASAP.

GET IT TOGETHER BA KA

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RMT detected !

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Nope your analogy is critically flawed because Nike still gets paid when their products sell in Walmart. Pretty poor analogy.

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That’s like comparing buying a tv from the manufacturer vs buying one out of the back of a van in the alley. One is legal and intended the other is more than a bit shady even if cheaper.

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I have never purchased gold from a third party gold seller.

I had a feeling somebody would come at my argument from that direction, because they can’t argue against the ideas themselves. Adhominem attacks are pretty obvious sign of Sophist mentalities.

Good job.

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What’s that saying? If i had more time i would have written less? Something like that.

It’s a bit too wordy, and you lost me at about paragraph 2. The economy would probably still suck, true. That being said, the economy would be deflationary instead of inflationary, so it would change the course of the economy and that’s significant

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Holy useless wall of text batman.

RMTing is literally the same as cheating. Players that RMT get a massive advantage over players who do not. That alone should be reason enough for a perma ban but thats neither here nor there. The main issue at this point is the bots. The bots are only in this game to fill the massive demand for RMT. Demand is only so high because AGS have publicly stated MANY times that they will not permaban for first offenses outside of extreme cases. The bots have slowly over time MASSIVELY inflated the hell out of the economy. Forcing more and more players to feel pressured to buy gold. Its a vicious cycle that could have been stopped months ago by simply changing this policy to zero tolerance. Demand would have dropped. Bots would have reduced. Inflation would have slowed.

There is no logical argument for defending these players. If you RMT, I don’t care what you reasoning is, you are a cheater and you are funding the bots.

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The hypocrisy is wild ~
Yea, people who cheat and steal get full blame for their actions.

Can you really blame someone for succumbing to fomo and peer pressure and buying gold from bots, directly causing these queues and economy problems?
Yup, you sure can!

Letting players continue to cheat with minimal consequences leads to more people doing it and related problems agravating ?
All the business inteligence and data ags has could never have predicted such erratic behavior ~

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image

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I get what you mean, and it’s true. AGS/SG hold the most power when preventing RMT. Making botting more difficult, punishments harsher, and “legal” ways to get gold more attractive would do a lot to eliminate RMT.

It doesn’t help that this game has an almost direct translation from IRL money to in-game gold as well.

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I mean the consequences are bots. Everyone here buys clothes from slave labor, or child labor but I don’t see anyone getting their pitchforks out for the kids in Bangladesh and Pakistan. I hate when communities try taking the moral high ground on issues, while ignoring everything else. Yes doing one but not the other is better, but acting like everyone is above and better than don’t RMT just isn’t a valid point. These discussions shouldn’t even happen, AGs should fix the damn issues instead of people on here trying to do mental gymnastics on why it’s bad or good.

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yeah yeah,

or

I don’t even care answering you given the amount of things you said that needs to be corrected, to what I’ll just give one fact :

players engaging into RMT practices buy gold to BOT companies, this gold is generated from thin air and server heat. resulting in inflation of all prices in the market.

players buying royal cristals, then proceed to exchange them through the blue crystal auction market, which is directly sold to other players. those gold coming from the other players, participate in the market and does not produce inflation. moreover, the marie’s shop allow converting those blue crystals directly in honing materials, thus doubling down on the positive impact it has on the market.

as a matter of fact, the more legit players buy from cash shop, the lower the blue crystals prices are driven, and the more players engage with the marie’s secret shop, thus maintaining a fair economy between f2p players and whales…

WHEREAS,

RMT enjoyers, double down on the Negative impact of the market inflation, because the BUY blue crystals for pheons, and honing materials from mariies secret shop, up until the blue crystal honing material prices are equal to buying the mats from the auction house. which in turns, raise the prices even higher.

you really have to be clueless to think that RMT == cash_shop

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I disagree.

I agree.

I absolutely disagree with this. Demand is high because people don’t want to spend the crazy money Lost Ark demands in the in-game store. That’s natural, everybody wants the best bang for their buck. The demand is generated by getting the same thing at a much lower price through gold sellers.

The demand does not exist because AGS has publicly stated that they’re not going to punish real players. They’re not going to punish real players because they can’t afford to lose real players.

Since you can’t be bothered to read, I’ll summarize that my entire point was that the bot issue exist because of AGS, that the demand for RTM Gold exists because of AGS, and the horrendous in-game economy exists because of AGS.

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Blaming these ‘RMT’ players really doesn’t make sense to me. Banning them will not have any effect whatsoever on the bad economy. Banning them will only accomplish the one thing Smilegate and Amazon can’t afford right now, and that’s to eliminate actual human players.

This is where you and most people are wrong.

First off, RMT means higher blue crystals prices, compared to lower if gold is bought with royal crystals.

So yeah, idc if someone steals the Nikes because it doesn’t affect me. I do care if someone steals them and then the legit store forces the next customer to pay double. Which is what’s happening in this game.

As for the players leaving, I guarantee you that for every RMTer not getting banned, 5 legit players leave. It’s not all about ilvl or content, it’s about playing a game with integrity.

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You sure did use alot of words to be incorrect. I feel you could have done it in a single sentence, but good for you with testing your keyboards patience.

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They should be attacking this from every conceivable angle. Not just banning bot accounts which does absolutely nothing. The consequences of other players cheating should not spill over on to the general community like this. Its unacceptable and it is costing them thousands of legitimate players. The game is basically a cheaters paradise right now. I wont sit here and listen to people defend this crap. They need stricter policies. Permaban or negative gold or hell ANYTHING longer than a simple 3 day slap on the wrist.

Obviously in addition to this they also need to beef up on their detection methods for RMT. Better account security to prevent botters from mass producing millions of accounts. Better anticheat in general. All things that people have been begging them to do for MONTHS.

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This is one thing most people miss. They don’t know that blue crystal supply is dependent on Royal Crystals being sold for gold. Thus the F2P is not affected by RMT argument fails.

If I were to relate it to OPs analogy, buying from Nike = taxes, buying from Walmart at cheaper price = no taxes. Taxes are used then for better roads, bridges, etc… that will benefit the whole population while buying cheap from walmart where there are no taxes only benefits those that bought it for cheap.

Is AGS at fault for having bad systems/security? Yes. But those who knowingly abuse the system are also guilty.

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Also, I’d like to point out that I’m not really defending them, just that it’s natural that people will spend less if they have the opportunity. It’s just a reality about people.

Who’s more to blame? The person who tries to get a better deal on in-game gold, or the company that created the circumstances that not only allowed it, but has done nothing to stop it?