About real money trading (RMT) being used to gain zeny in RO servers.

[distilled1]

The other day, I saw a server with an attitude like "yeah whatever go ahead and run the risk of real money trading but if you get scammed that's not our fault," which was pretty bold but also kind of refreshing to hear.

It got me re-thinking my attitude towards real money trading in RO servers.
Personally, I'm not even sure about my own opinion here.

On the one hand, I don't think it's entirely a fair thing to allow because RO is a globally played game by people of all different nations, some nations, or even people within the same nation, being less wealthy than others, and therefore being left at a disadvantage.
On the other hand, I personally work a full time job, and often feel like I'd rather have an extra day off in the week to farm some zeny on my favorite server(s) than be working, and therefore wish the extra money I made that day could instead be turned into zeny on the server(s) I enjoy playing on.

I'm just curious what you all think. I made a silly poll if you don't mind voting or sharing your opinions in this thread.

Thanks!

[Gene]

Moderated RMT is the best IMO. Servers with official middlemen or doing it themselves makes it worry free while the server itself gets a cut to pay for expenses similar to donations.

With this feature, anyone not using the official server midman has no right to complain when they get scammed.

I prefer it to be allowed because this happens either way, allowed or not because players will still do it secretly.

[Mammouth]

  False or true? I don't know: I once talked with a person who employed Filipinos (30+) to farm zeny all day, and then resell the zeny to Europeans at high prices, making a huge profit, a well-oiled business. Apparently, some were even paid to prevent/slow down large guilds from doing major MVPs to keep them from accessing valuable loot (icepick/CK/diabolus/valk, etc., which often sell for tens of millions of zeny. Why? I don't know).

The big problem with RMT, as you pointed out, is that it is impossible/very difficult to control. Even if the GM is present and watching the logs, how can you prove that it's RMT and not just two friends helping each other? It's complicated...

Personally, for me, RO is a kind of escape from the real world, a refuge. Knowing that real money is so involved in the world of Midgard disgusts me. Therefore, I am against it.

[distilled1]

Spoiler

False or true? I don't know: I once talked with a person who employed Filipinos (30+) to farm zeny all day, and then resell the zeny to Europeans at high prices, making a huge profit, a well-oiled business. Apparently, some were even paid to prevent/slow down large guilds from doing major MVPs to keep them from accessing valuable loot (icepick/CK/diabolus/valk, etc., which often sell for tens of millions of zeny. Why? I don't know).

The big problem with RMT, as you pointed out, is that it is impossible/very difficult to control. Even if the GM is present and watching the logs, how can you prove that it's RMT and not just two friends helping each other? It's complicated...

Personally, for me, RO is a kind of escape from the real world, a refuge. Knowing that real money is so involved in the world of Midgard disgusts me. Therefore, I am against it.

[close]

I think that's an excellent point.
Likewise, I like to think of my online games as worlds I'm immersing and escaping into, but more importantly, a game where everyone plays by the same rules with the same advantages.

I like to use board games as a comparison. Monopoly, Dungeons and Dragons, etc, whatever. If a group of buddies sat down to play a D&D in real life, and the dungeon master said to the group "who ever gives me 10 dollars in real life throughout this game gets an extra 100 gold pieces on their character," every player would look at him like an a-hole and insist on someone replace him as the dungeon master.

At the same time though, maybe not the best comparison to online games because players of a board game can't get ahead of you when you have to stop playing and go to work. Everyone pauses the game until you're back.

I dunno man. Also like Gene mentioned, some servers already exchange real money for zeny in a roundabout way by selling tradeable cash shop items, so why not just go all the way and allow players to buy zeny on those types of servers.

This is a tough one for me. I like the idea of RMT in some ways, and hate it in other ways.
Would definitely suck if it incentivized players from poorer countries to come on, treat the game like a zeny farming job for wealthier people, and make the game unenjoyable from their cutthroat zeny farming or something to that effect.

[iixe]

OP has an unnecessarily strong opinion about other people using multiclients or not but has no clue if putting tons of rl money is okay for the server balance or not. lol. just lol.

Putting money into the game is a personal choice but RMT is used to get access to usally inaccessible goods such as MvP cards. And since RMT is considered as the only option, zeny or any other farmed stuff ingame doesn't matter anymore. It's impact surpresses anything else and leads to alot of inbalancing. Hosting a server becomes a simple whale hunting experience we see from mobile games at this point.
Server owner wants a new car? Just spawn 2-3 cards and openly advertise them for sale on a twink account. The abuse potential not only from the comunity but from hosters is literally infinite, i don't know why it even has to be discussed.
The only reason i see is some players don't realize how large that impact is as they have no impression about the sums some players willing to pay. Black markets on servers skyrocket prices even further but trying to regulate it doesn't mean it's under control by any means.

I'm getting stomach cramps when i see rms openly tolerates and even advertises such type of cancer servers.

[distilled1]

OP has an unnecessarily strong opinion about other people using multiclients or not

No I don't. Use multiple clients all you want. I do have strong preferences for servers that don't allow multi-clienting though yes. You seem to have an unnecessary problem with that. "lol just lol."

but has no clue if putting tons of rl money is okay for the server balance or not. lol. just lol.

That's true. It's why I made this thread. What's funny about me not knowing everything and wanting the opinions of others? Weird way to preface your message but okay hurting my fee-fees like that.

I like the rest of your message though and I admit I have literally zero experience playing servers that allow RMT, so I haven't experienced what the potential consequences might be.

I appreciate your insight and think I'll come to the conclusion that real money has no place influencing the balance of an RO server, even if I do sometimes get jelly of people who can stay on longer playing without me.

[Heuspers]

My take in this is that even if RMT is restricted some people will still do it anyway somewhere else just not in your server's discord. If the item being sold with real money is something legitly dropped I see no harm in it and let the players do what the players do. What's bad is, If the staff also join the RMT scene for quick bucks. This sadly happens to many private server and well we all know why people vehemently disagree with it.

TL;DR, For me pesonally, RMT okay between players if the rare drops are legitimate and staffs just stay away from it also don't @item and do SQL trickery to make some rare item legit drop for sale by the staffs.

(I've been running a customized renewal server that almost 2 years now OP, and we do employ what you said. We allow RMT between players and we do not partake in it nor care about it. We still have players that we serve, small it may be but they keep the server alive and thriving for years to come. Also we don't take our official middle-man fee cut, it's all for him and the trouble he had to put through everytime a transaction happening.)

[mrfizi]

As a player: I personally don't care about it. I just play and enjoy RO myself. I'm a casual player and Woe sometime.

As a server owner: I still don't care with RMT, but I'm 100% not responsible if anyone got scammed if they doing RMT.

[ForgotMyOldAccount]

I don't see any problem with RMT in itself. As long as it's farmed by another player. The issue is that money, just like in real life, often leads to corruption, and many servers with heavy RMT scenes inevitably get infested with bot zeny farmers and staff generating items on alt accounts for sale. If it was just normal RMT, as in I farm on my solo character, drop a card, and sell it to my friend for $5, this would essentially be no different than me farming a card and donating it to him for free. It's a transaction that has no bearing or impact on the economy on a macro scale. The issue itself always comes from the use of 3rd party tools and programs or GM activity which can generate far more items/zeny into an economy that any player realistically would be able to do.

[Naosuke]

In my opinion, the moment you start introducing real money in the game itself, it totally ruins the immersion and sucks out all the fun from it. That's one of the reasons most of companies abstract mtx, so you don't really keep thinking about the real world value of something, you know you spend something to get said currency, but once it turns in the "rainbow gems", a lot of people simply don't look at that in the same way.

I guess that's the main problem, and yes you could fix the black market problem and server and players could be able to make some money in the process, the moment it happens, the metric changes from "how long will it take for X" to "X cost that much to buy/I can sell X for this much" (in money terms, since you could do the same analogy with zeny, but you technically need to farm zeny). At some point, zeny basically lose it's meaning, as you can pretty much see in those servers which allow transactions with cashpoints directly in the vendor, all the important items are priced at that.

And that's just a surface level look tbh. All this will inevitably leads to more problems like botting or really restrictive sources of item acquisition as time passes by on a said server. There's a reason why a lot of good items and consumables are from cashshop, ofc the main one i because gravity want to suck you dry every single penny of ya wallet, but think on a large scale server, with botting and rmt problem in the context. Money is king in every civilized society. Another cherry is, the corruption of certain individual in each server, the drama threads would get twice as long :^)

I was looking in brazilian servers websites, cause even tho I don't play them, they seems to lean more towards bRO which is interesting, and the "#openmarket" spread like the plague everywhere you see, and makes sense if you look at the economy. Personally, such server makes no sense to me, I would always cash out and never cash in, till a point it's no more efficient, and then to the next server we go. I play games to relax and try to distance myself from real life issues, so even tho making an extra money on the side would be tempting, the sacrifice would be make one of the few hobbies I have into a basically 2nd job is currently something I'm not looking to do.

[Metan]

Putting money into the game is a personal choice but RMT is used to get access to usally inaccessible goods such as MvP cards. And since RMT is considered as the only option, zeny or any other farmed stuff ingame doesn't matter anymore. It's impact surpresses anything else and leads to alot of inbalancing. Hosting a server becomes a simple whale hunting experience we see from mobile games at this point.
Server owner wants a new car? Just spawn 2-3 cards and openly advertise them for sale on a twink account. The abuse potential not only from the comunity but from hosters is literally infinite, i don't know why it even has to be discussed.
The only reason i see is some players don't realize how large that impact is as they have no impression about the sums some players willing to pay. Black markets on servers skyrocket prices even further but trying to regulate it doesn't mean it's under control by any means.

Yup. RMTing as an illegal market damages zeny as 1) botting inflates the amount of zeny circulating in the server and 2) endgame items aren't sold for zeny (or for any other item in game, for that matter), thus gnawing at its status as a coin (you could have 10b, and someone would rather sell a MVP card for real money if the option is quite there), and allowing RMT renders zeny nigh useless, as 1) the server becomes a bot haven and 2) zeny is downgraded to the status of a s***coin that nobody really wants to hold on to more than they would like. And no player should ever rest assured that the GMs aren't in on it as well, duping items for their own benefit. At any rate, it ceases to be a game.

Ultimately, players shouldn't be neutral about this. It's not some stupid "pick a side" braindead politics you see in real life, it's simply common sense. When RMTers establish themselves in a server and the GMs fail to stop them (or join them), the server goes under. It's no different from handling a disease.

IMO, servers that make this affair part of their "game" should be banned from RMS. The more advertising they get, the bigger RMT becomes, and the likelier that it'll spread to other servers that were relatively safe until then.

[distilled1]

Spoiler

Yup. RMTing as an illegal market damages zeny as 1) botting inflates the amount of zeny circulating in the server and 2) endgame items aren't sold for zeny (or for any other item in game, for that matter), thus gnawing at its status as a coin (you could have 10b, and someone would rather sell a MVP card for real money if the option is quite there), and allowing RMT renders zeny nigh useless, as 1) the server becomes a bot haven and 2) zeny is downgraded to the status of a s***coin that nobody really wants to hold on to more than they would like. And no player should ever rest assured that the GMs aren't in on it as well, duping items for their own benefit. At any rate, it ceases to be a game.

Ultimately, players shouldn't be neutral about this. It's not some stupid "pick a side" braindead politics you see in real life, it's simply common sense. When RMTers establish themselves in a server and the GMs fail to stop them (or join them), the server goes under. It's no different from handling a disease.

[close]

Thank you, Metan, for speaking up about your values and ideals for RO. You clearly idealize RO as game first and foremost, to be untarnished by any possibility of corruption. An imaginary game world used to progress a character, and not used as an opportunity to advance yourself in real life. Real money can be a very corrupting thing.
Largely, I don't agree with RMT in online gaming for the exact reasons you mentioned. There's just always going to a small part of me that wishes, once in a while, a guy could at least make a deal with his close online buddy to trade a little extra real life efforts for a little extra RO efforts as free, consenting adults, so long as no other corruption came of it, but I'm perfectly content without that possibility, and entirely respect rules against any forms of RMTing.

IMO, servers that make this affair part of their "game" should be banned from RMS. The more advertising they get, the bigger RMT becomes, and the likelier that it'll spread to other servers that were relatively safe until then.

That part is pretty bold, but I certainly wouldn't disagree with RMS providing something akin to warning labels on any listed server known with a reputation for allowed real money trading.
People are always going to whistle blow on a server they've witnessed GM corruption on when said corruption is against the rules, so there will never be a world where RMT servers begin influencing non-RMT servers IMO.

[Xellie]

I dislike it for many reasons:

1/ RO is escapism from the real world, being reminded of financial pressures irl ruins that.

2/ It allows the accumulation of equipment and zeny into the hands of very few people, causing a large power discrepancy

3/ RO is *addictive* - that makes anything involving irl money for gain ingame unethical.

I've seen servers destroyed by the one guy who can drop $40k on buying every MVP card and god item he can find within the space of a month.

No desire to see that again.



Oh and not everyone likes 24/7 interaction with others. 

[OldPoring]

Can I choose the option "It's stupid"?

This would make sense in the hypothetical situation of only 1-5 servers for the entire World. And at the same time, if this game is at the peak of popularity (I don't know who is at the peak now, I only know Genshin).
But in an old game, but with several dozen pirate servers? And at the same time without guarantees that it will not close at any time?
I can't imagine the degree of addiction that should be not just to Ragnarok game, but to have addiction to a certain Ragnarok server. In my opinion, this is very stupid.

Helping your favorite server to work (if the administration really asks), probably this is normal and good if you have extra money.
-----
To clarify, I think it's stupid to buy in-game gears for real money on any RO server. But if there is such a fool, then it is normal to sell something for real money to him.

[naturall]

enable rtm > generate items with gm commands > @kami/@b or another similar announcing the drop of an mvp card (optional) > sell them with a user account through rtm.

before, these types of deals were made through administrators and strong donors. i remember receiving offers from people from Arab countries to have access to items that were not on the donation list.

it can now be done openly through a users account.

[moonlitPBJ]

I want a healthy server economy that evolves organically via trading in-game currency & items ONLY.
My take: The moment you introduce RMT, you open the floodgates for inflation, corrupted staff members(it only takes one), and bad actors.

[Arcadia Online]

It takes away from the rewarding feeling of gaining something, even if some others RMT and thus get things that you had to work for easier.

[OldPoring]

You can still rejoice at this phenomenon. Because this only happens in popular games. This means that RO is still popular