You have written a great analysis here. When I read this I thought about what you said in my own terms of when I play WOW. At first the game is new and you really don’t care about how long it takes to level because you are taking it all in. Fast forward time and I now have five levels 70’s, two others in their 60’s, a few in their 40’s and more on the way at level 36 or less. Slowness in time for me is going from start to 70. So, I think in terms how can I efficiently move to level 70? I now pay for a total of 3 WOW subscriptions, distributed some of my 70’s to the other two accounts and run my lower level characters through quests that are orange and red. Doing this I am able to say level my level 33 druid to level 37 in about 2 hours as opposed 8 to 12 hours. I was rather surprised that despite not killing mobs for full experience had little impact on the bottom line as far as experience point accumulation in the long run in order to level up.

On other thoughts, I don’t like the word greed used in the context of self-interest because self-interest is a good thing. Greed in my opinion is misunderstood for self-interest. Greed desires to have something and obtain it without earning it. Greed has the mentality, “I have the right to possess what is yours”. Greedy people often use guilt to make you feel wrong about an issue in order to get you sacrifice for them. Greed has a strong tie with envy, jealously, and misery. Self Interest finds a way to obtain what is desired honorably, earning it, even if the means of doing so is efficient. The efforts of self-interest create values and those who participate in a mutual agreement benefit by their own efforts, weather it is one person working for self or a group of people working collectively. Both greed and self-interest desire to have or even to have more of something, however it is the implementation of how the desired value is obtained that makes the distinction between two.

In a mmo, your time killing things, translates into gold. Or you make items (killing things, gather parts, crafting), then sell them to other players for their gold (time). You then transform your gold (time) into healing potions, skills, and armor at the vendor. The gold never really is destroyed until you stop playing the games. Since in the end it is transformed into your Level.

But those Chinese farmers…… they have infinite time.

Hence they inflate time per person!!!

People go online and buy from farmers when the game requires too much time per fun. The game is too boring so you want it to go faster. Hence you buy gold online… so your account gets time added to it without the time. You can go buy your healing potions, skills and armor. The problem here is the developers trying to make the game take too long (too much time), in order for them to collect more of those lovely monthly fees.

All people are essentially lazy and greedy. In the real world these two traits are balanced against each other. The amount of laziness and the amount of greed vary in every individual. Hence you will always have some gold buying on any online game. Since gold buying allows a person to be both lazy and greedy, in the virtual world. However the real money that pays for that gold comes from somewhere, so a persons real world balance between laziness and greed does come into play.

If there is runaway inflation in a game, it is because people are buying way too much gold online. This means there are large numbers of farmers in the game. Which means the game is too slow. The solution is to add MORE gold, and consume less, hence make the game go faster, and become more fun. Making more people want to play it, and pay those lovely monthly fees.

Hence the system is flawed, hence the game is designed poorly. If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be a need to dodge the system.

I think a useful metric for judging the integrity of an MMO’s basic design is how much RMT occurs (with relation to its player population). In that sense a game that is plagued with RMT relative to population could be said to have serious systemic flaws (and therefore bad design). A game that has little RMT with a robust population could be said to have a successful systemic design.

I bought gold just the other day, and you can say what you want, but for me, it was worth it. I make enough working full time at my job that I have purchased every game and movie that I have desired, pay my bills, and live. For me that is the problem, I don’t have enough time to do everything. working 50 hours or more a week, gaming time is hard to come by, and when I do get to play I want to have fun, not do somethng boring and repitive for hours on end. Not to mention if I did spend 150 hours doing something over several months, my online friends would have already done that same 150 hours in a week or two.