As for the notion that allowing RMT only encourages gold farming, which ultimately inflates the economy because farmers play all day, he says it's "a more compelling argument, but it's not a particularly airtight one. ... The problem is, catassing [repetitive play, usually at the expense of personal hygiene] ... exists independently of gold farming." That is, regular people spend all day playing the game anyway, so what's wrong with farmers doing it, too? "You always have those outlying players that, because they have inhuman or superhuman abilities to sit there and waste their lives on [games], will [cause problems like that]."
Speaking of the players, I asked him what his thoughts were on the buyers, what motivated them to get involved in buying items and gold. The usual argument is "players are lazy," while there's another school of thought that sees a flaw in the game design itself. He opted for neither. "On the one hand, I don't think it's a matter of players just being lazy. I think it's a matter of there being lots of ways to play the game. And for some people, there are great rewards in doing it themselves and pounding away at the grind. For others, the rewards lie elsewhere. They like keeping up with their guildmates and so forth. And, you know, just because they don't want to play the grind sub-game doesn't mean that they're lazy. And just because some people hate the grind doesn't mean that it's a bad, stupid thing for developers to put in there, in the core of the game."
For developers looking to stop RMT, he uses one example he's gotten from the farmers themselves, such as "completely anonymous trades. [Make] the auction house the only way to trade, and [make it] completely anonymous, so there's no mapping an eBay buyer onto an in-game player," though he acknowledges that would be "breaking the socialization effect of the economy." As for stopping gold farming itself, he points to a suggestion made by a farmer on Terra Nova: "You just make a map of the conceivable normal human player's ability to acquire gold in the game, and there's going to be a bell curve." You can use that curve to determine the maximum amount of money any normal player could reasonably have and make that a hard asset cap. He does acknowledge that "you'll piss off maybe one or two power players who get caught in that, but other than that, you just shut it off. Now, obviously, they'll eventually find a way back around it ... by splitting up bots and things, but that's going to throw a monkey wrench in their works. For a while."
That was one thing that really stuck out for me in the book. The gold farmers and merchandisers were absolutely relentless, poking at a game system for hours and hours on end looking at the most obscure mechanics, toiling away until they finally found an angle to work. "Yeah. I don't want to piss off the anti-RMT faction any more, but in some ways, that to me makes [farmers] the ultimate power players. And, certainly, some of the guys I talked to," he cites one farmer who had "a perfectly fine day job as a programmer for Microsoft, that was his big motivation. He really was like a player, and his play happened to net him $80,000 in fiscal year 2003."
Even in the heart of gold farming country, the sweatshops in China where workers are paid to acquire gold, he was surprised. "I really expected that this really is the far limit of the industrialization of play, this gold-farming stuff in China." He assumed the business would be "a racket run by middle-aged businessmen who have figured out an angle because their textile export business failed." However, he says that was not the case. "In fact, everybody from the owners down to the players were gamers who, A, had to know about games and love games in order to be able to figure out how this whole thing worked; and, B, just still kind of got a kick out of the whole thing, out of being this close to the game and really struggling to figure out how to maximize their profits. ... It certainly is surprising to find out how much closer to the average gamer in outlook these people are than the average gold farmer hater would expect."
