There is no Secondary Market

I was watching Marcus Eikenberry's (MarkeeDragon) interview with Geoffrey Zatkin (former designer at SOE for Everquest and current owner and operator of Electronic Entertainment Design and Research) about everybody's favorite topic - Real Money Trading (RMT) / secondary markets:



My notes along the way:

"100s of CS hours per week, millions of dollars a year"

"Myth of the primary market"

"A short circuit in the secondary market is a short circuit in the primary market"

"grind is the design"

I'm always looking for metrics, so numbers like "hundreds of customer service hours per week" and "millions of dollars per year" catch my eye... because I want to focus on "Seven Figure Security" problems.

Good stuff.

Somethings did bother me:

Postulate: A player will quit earlier once they've consumed all of the content (often expressed by items that are accumlated).

Hypothesis: Buying items (via gold farming) short circuits that content.

Assertion: Having items early makes players stop playing earlier.

HOWEVER:

Hypothesis: Friends being able to give friends items is good.

If this was true, than the assertion above would say that having items earlier from friends OR farmers is bad.

...so we have a problem.

There is no secondary market or primary market.

There is only ONE market.

The intent or actions of players external to the game are not part of the market.

This is why the "secondary market" is so hard to "stop".

It is REALLY hard to determine the intent or actions of players outside of the game.

ASIDE:

Once upon a time, I was working on a really big, government security project. One of the things we needed to do was print out labels for our customers.

Our labels were supposed to be unclassified.

There was a real concern that our customers would not be all that smart and they would ask us to create classified labels (where the labels themselves were classified) as opposed to unclassified labels for classified things (and you wonder why I left that world ?).

The suggestion that was being seriously discussed when I started on the project was to create a tool that would "look" at the label data that our customers provided to determine if it was classified. This had gotten pretty serious, people were off looking at parsers, methods to determine if data was classified, etc.

I argued that this was madness.

There was no way that we could determine that other people's data was classified.

Just as there is no way for a spell checker to determine whether you've chosen the wrong word.

END ASIDE

Computers (and other rule based systems) have a heck of a time determine intent.

It is the same with any game.

Games provide mechanisms for exchanging items between players: gifting, "the auction house", contracts, loot sharing, etc.

Players will use those mechanisms to meet their objectives as people, not the developer's objectives. Whether it is for money, for fun, to play with one's friends, to save time, whatever.

Games provide mechanisms for earning items: killing monsters, questing, raiding, PvP, etc.

Players will use those objectives to meet their personal objectives. Gold farming is simply playing a game's economic system really, really efficiently... from within the game, it is not illegal. It is breaking the "social game" that the game developer attempts to impose, but it is not violating the game's mechanics (duping is not farming). Botting is similar, it is a program playing on behalf of a person (as opposed to the client program that the developer provides).

Games provide mechanisms for owning and funding accounts: credit cards, debit cards, passwords, pre-paid cards, offers, ads, Players will use these mechanisms for their own intents - power-leveling, purchasing accounts, phishing, logging in, paying, etc.

Too many times, games confuse accounts with people.

This is why these forms of "social game "cheating" are so difficult to detect... because they are not part of the game's mechanics and cannot be detected from within the game engine... the developer has to "ferret out" the intent of the player.... are you a "good" player?

The social game is important, but it is not the GAME. Its rules are squishy, subject to interpretation and error.

The GAME is simply an "API", an interface to the world, developer need to understand the difference between the game and the world and the nature of the interface. There is no secondary market - there are means to transfer goods within the game and there are means to transfer goods outside of the game.

For people, there is only one market.