By limiting the ability of organized groups to extract realizable profit from RMT, while simultaneously opening illicit RMT to competition from normal players (through Secure GTC trades and PLEX) who are interested in gaining more time to play the game, CCP is actively discouraging all of the above, as well as the normally aberrant in-game behavior associated with gold farming.

You’ve done nothing to justify the proposition that a completely open RMT market would really be more effective at this, but it’s certainly clear that these groups would have an easier time if their transactions were enabled by developer support for their business model.

The Cartels solved the trust issues with time codes in the years before CCP implemented a secure timecode sales process. Resellers would buy time codes in a timezone were the RL currency was strong and time codes were cheap, and sell them in timezones where weaker economies made time codes more valuable in terms of isk. Dealers would get their codes from corp and alliance members with good reputations, and then resell them, at a markup, to the public. The public would recognize resellers as trustworthy, accountable businessmen and buy their codes with confidence. Resellers took steps to insure that they didn't get screwed at either end of the transaction, they kept careful records of who provided which codes, and kept all communications ingame where GMs could easily follow the paper trail if something went wrong.

In Goonswarm, we had a closed community with strict rules for admission and regulations to hold people accountable for scamming within the community. This environment allowed a few enterprising Goons to build thriving time code businesses. Outside of Goonswarm, there were a few other major resellers, but I am uncertain of how they sourced their codes and maintained quality. It didn't take long for all the resellers to get together and start fixing prices. For a while, timecodes were the most profitable business in eve, the resellers made tens of billions of isk for very little effort, all that was required for a transaction with a 30 million isk profit margin was a spreadsheet and a couple of quick convos.

Then CCP introduced the new, secure timecode transfer system, and announced that it was now the only supported time code exchange method, please use the new system for all exchanges and stop flooding the petition queue with time code issues. Thank you, and goodbye. Won Ton, one of the major players in the time code business took a look at the new system and realized that it was the end of the Time Cartels, his business was built on trust, and the new system allowed anyone to buy or sell codes without fear of scams. Won Ton then took another look at the new, revised rules on time code scamming, and announced a going out of business sale.

In the space a few hours, Won Ton scammed most of his regular customers out of tens of billions of isk, simply by asking for cash up front and then failing to deliver the promised codes. The forums exploded, petitions were filed, and Won Ton just pointed to the new, revised rules and laughed. His account was banned, but after a few days of polite debate and lively arguments with the GMs, they unbanned him. Since he had scammed his customers via the old, unsupported ( and unprohibited ) method of simply exchanging codes via ingame convo, instead of the new, supported, scamproof, foolproof, and confusingly unfamiliar system, it was perfectly legal. CCP quickly amended the rules to explicitly prohibit using any method other than the approved system to transfer time codes, and issued a blanket ban on any kind of time code scamming.

Won Ton got to keep the isk.

This can be translated to "Screw you, you better go back to rice farming or prostitution (or whatever the previous step down in the wealth ladder the sweatshop workers did before) as long as I don't get to hear about it"

What I was referring to with negative aspects of RMT are referring to sweatshops, slave labor, unscrupulous dealers scamming customers, and the lost tax income to national governments from the underground nature of the business. By embracing RMT in an open market, these things theoretically go away due to market forces (except the last one, which follows after the broad global market embraces it). But, this is all part of the broader discussion on RMT, which is the focus of the rest of this series of articles, so stay tuned.

If a neophyte found this article, you would not have helped them in any way, would you? Please update the article, doing a case study on purchasing GTC from eg: Shattered Crystal, converting GTC to 2 x PLEX in-game items, and then selling those items on the in-game market. At the same time you might also want to explore the idea that scamming is a regular feature of all player to player interaction in this game, and fake buyers posting in response to your GTC for sale threads is a way of manipulating the market.

You also fail to indicate why it would be desirable to have ISK-to-Dollars conversion. The meatspace issues this would raise are incredible, and would burden the players of the game in every country with having to claim their in-game assets on their meatspace tax returns (or Business Activity Statements, if they are a company). Perhaps you could compare it to the second hand book trade, at which point we'd really be asking CCP for permission to trade accounts in "the real world" for real money.

There is much more to the issue than you have chosen to cover, please follow up so you don't end up misleading new players into thinking that the GTC-for-ISK trade is broken. Highlight the fact that scamming and market manipulation is the natural order of things in EVE Online.

As AURA used to say, "welcome to the world of piracy and capitalism!"

Shipping time.
International charges.
Limit of 3.

Also, your first reply to me says "no market can survive without trust". My reply aimed to show that there is trust transference from CCP to their sanctioned ETC retailers. If you want to be truly pessimistic, there's always the chance that CCP will go away – and that's absolutely permitted by their EULA.

1. RMT does not, in of itself, cause in-game inflation. In-game inflation is caused by the way the games generate money & items from nothing. For example, the NPC you sell your junk loot to never runs out of money to buy more loot… which leads to inflation. RMT can indeed make inflation affect the game much more severely than it normally would- this is not because it's being traded for real world money but because the people who do RMT gather huge amounts of cash but rarely, if ever, remove it from the game through money-sinks. During normal play, if the Devs don't find enough ways to force you to sink your money/items back into the void then you'll get inflation anyhow.

2. The other major drawback to RMT is getting burned, ripped off, etc. In my opinion, this is simply a standard buyer-beware problem, and can be avoided by simply not engaging in RMT.

3. The final drawback ties in with number 1. RMT tends to attract people who run a lot of drones to farm the resources. These drones usually do not contribute anything to the game community- they don't participate with others or share anything, and tend to tie up the best farming spots. This is again an issue with how the games are designed, and not something that is unique to RMT. You will see this same effect when a server is overpopulated or when the Devs have not provided a large enough map, or enough quests, raids, hunting spots, etc for the quantity of players who are attempting to use them.

I want to touch on something in your comment. You mention that people willing to break the terms of a EULA accept a high risk. That's absolutely correct; and the question remains (far more research needs to be done to answer it) whether those people are even aware of the risks. It's been well documented that EULAs, like any other large contract, are generally glossed over by most people. Even EVEs, which I've studied extensively and I believe is one of the easier EULAs to understand, can be confusing to people. Aside from being a journalist, I'm a legal analyst by trade — should these EULAs be written for people like me, or for the target audience of the game? That's one aspect. Another aspect is, how do you put a value in the cost/benefit analysis of a RMT transaction to a player? For some people, getting that ISK in order to buy a 2 year character is perfectly worth the risk of losing an account.

Would making player to player cash transactions available boost the efficiency? I don't really believe so. By requiring all players, no matter where they are in the world and what cash currency they use, to convert real money into game time as the first step, CCP succeeds in defining a common global currency for trades. To price oil in the dollar we had to win World War II – and I don't think CCP is counting on an equivalent event to price all MMORPG game time in Euros. Once you have a common global currency in Eve for trading – GTCs and their equivalent – the trading environment is very robust, player to player, and has the checks and balances in place to support enforcing the shared rules for everyone (i.e. the EULA). Converting to in game RMT doesn't seem to add much at all when you look across the system as defined. Most of the deficiencies are actually in having to scan a forum for interested buyers instead of just marketing GTCs in game – hence the addition of PLEX which you chose not to cover in your "case study."

All told I'm not sure how you leap forward to addressing child labor by standardizing RMT in MMORPGs. I also want to suggest that there are many elements in play when it comes to how markets operate above and beyond simply leveraging lower cost workers to undercut competitors. Eve's markets provide some of the purest PvP in any game I've ever played – and that's a good part of why they are there in the game and metagame. When dealing with supplier trust issues, the naive assumption that common regulation results in honesty seems to ignore every toxic child's toy China has shipped to the west for the past decade. And finally laws around RMT seem largely unnecessary unless we are going to drive MMORPG operators to apply for their banking and market licenses, as well as classify every MMORPG player as an employee or independent contractor registered in the game market. The tax implications of that would be staggering, but as Second Life seems to want to pave that road we only can wish them the best of luck as every nation in world lines up on their door asking to have full access to the entire Second Life user base to find revenue and taxation opportunities.