What Price The Prize?

Yesterday on twitter a conversation started about the upcoming Skill Point trading in which famous blogger Noisy said some things I disagreed with. Before I get into the conversation, Noisy is one of the best EVE bloggers and someone's whose opinion I value highly, so I was not trying to pick a fight or troll him. Not sure if twitter conversations capture the nuance enough to make that point.

To reiterate something I've blogged about in the past, I've come to feel that the skill points system is an unnecessary limitation that impacts negatively newer players and has virtually no impact on veteran players. So while I would prefer that skill points are removed almost wholesale, I'm not opposed to a system that allows newer players to get skill points if they so desire to reduce the negative impact imposed on them by the system. For the record, the Character Bazaar is a similar system but far more advantageous to veteran players since the skill point trading is done via an entire character and thus the costs per transaction are far higher.

Back to the conversation above. Noisy says that skill point trading is contrary to the purpose of the game which he defines as "to journey thru the galaxy developing your character in hopefully fun and/or interesting ways". That's a good purpose; in fact its an admirable purpose, but I disagree its the purpose of the entire game.

This is the meat of the disagreement here, a fundamental parting of ways on whether or not being willing to pay cash to skip parts of the game is an acceptable practice or not. Other people compared it to purchasing a max level character in World of Warcraft. Noisy is of the opinion that if you want to skip part A to get to part B, then you should just stop playing the game. But I'm of the opinion that if part B is considered enough value to you to skip part A, paying cash for it should not be a big deal and should be allowed. 

In EVE's case, there are multiple "grinds" aka limitations: the ISK grind, the skill point grind, and the ability/experience grind. My enjoyment primarily lies in testing my ability against other pilots in PvP as both a pilot and Fleet Commander. I've been in the game so long that I've past the ISK grind and skill point grind but I could imagine coming into the game, wanting to get into the PvP in a meaningful competitive way, and being frustrated by the ISK and skill point grind and wanting to get a boost past them. PLEX already offers a way for the former, and now Skill Point trading offers a way for the latter. 

Noisy seems to be a hardliner against any form of paying cash to skip any limitation presented by EVE and I can see his point of view, even if I disagree with it. I don't think we should allow someone to pay cash and get "gold bullets" or any other advantage over other players that cannot be obtained in any method except cash, for example. Nor do I think we need to allow them to skip progression entirely so that they skill up to perfect titan pilots in a matter of a few minutes and lots of credit card payments. I do think there is a middle ground to be found to allow those with more cash than time to find happiness in the game without unbalancing the game for those with the opposite.

Noisy's attitudes towards RMT may put him in one minority, but I'm sure my attitudes towards skill points (death to skill points!) puts me in a different minority. I hope the different perspectives help CCP continue to make a good game.

Remuneration

Consider, if you will, the entire EVE Online universe. Not just the game, but rather the game and the metagame that extends beyond it and spills out in great gobs on the internet. Alliance and corp forums, fitting tools, mapping tools, industry calculators, guides, wikis, blogs, podcasts, news sites, artwork, fiction, gaming sites... If you step back far enough the actual game seems like only half of the game's universe!

Some of these external metagame things are small, like this here blog, and others are huge undertakings with many moving parts and functions like Dotlan EveMaps. Some are the results of individual effort and others are the results of many hands sharing the load and responsibilities as suits their strengths. The larger enterprises even end up developing their own corporate power structures with bosses at the top and "employees" at the bottom.

The width and breadth of the metagame is astounding.

Imagine, just for a second, if EVE did not exist outside the game world. No EVE University wiki; no Dotlan maps, no killboards, no EveNews24.com, no Hydrostatic podcast, no Rixx Javix artwork, no Mumble servers, no Jabber channels, no corporate forums... imagine everything had to be done in the game. Not a pretty site, is it? Imagine setting up a fleet op with a certain doctrine using only the in game calendar and fitting tool and then running the op on EVE Voice and the in-game map. Not a pretty sight, is it?

The fact of the matter is that thousands, if not tens of thousands of person hours per year have been put into this metagame universe and its almost all been done for free. And its been going on for about 10 years.

Well, not quite for free. Operators of out of game sites that qualify as Fansites can get their account paid for by CCP as a promotional gift. For example, my main account with Kirith Kodachi has been paid for by CCP for the past 3 years for running this blog. I don't get a second free account for the podcast I run and I pay for my other two accounts normally. I don't know exactly how this works for sites with more than one operator, like a podcast or a news site, but its safe to assume that all the major contributors to qualifying sites get a free promotional account.

Does this cover the cost of the effort and expenses of running such a site? Except for the most simplest blogs, probably not. Between my blog and podcast, I have yearly fees for the domain and storage space that are covered by the free account, but that does not cover the time the creative effort takes to write and record podcasts. That's OK, its a hobby and its a price I'm willing to absorb as a cost of getting the creative juices flowing.

But consider the effort some of the larger sites require. Not only webserver costs, but admin maintenance, development costs, storage costs, security, and creative effort. Some of these projects require many hours of planning and implementation to get off the ground and run effectively. A single $150 account per year is a drop in the bucket in comparison.

The point is that its not surprising that a large complex site with multiple people involved sought to turn the project into a money-making venture. I don't know if it started off with that goal or it was considered an objective later on after it possibly became a time-sucking second job, but somewhere along the line someone probably said "I work harder on this than I do my real job, I wish I got paid for it!"

I'm not excusing any rule breaking that occurred, nor am I trying to whitewash anyone's motives. I am not privy to what really what on behind the scenes with any of the involved parties. What I am saying is that I don't find it surprising that a major project tried to get some remuneration for their effort that was consistent with the effort.

I know some sites try to get some return from their effort by selling merchandise like Eveoganda does. Of course, you have to be careful not to run afoul of CCP's legal department in the process.

At the end of the day I think major undertakings should have a method to help pay for the costs beyond the free account, and I think it should be done in cooperation with CCP instead of running around them. I don't believe RMT is the answer by any stretch of the imagination as I believe RMT ruins the gameplay for everyone. These out of game services need an out of game solution and I think it behooves CCP to think hard about it as it the benefit to the game these sites brings is immeasurable.

Bottom of the Slippery Slope

Over at Jester's Trek, he has a post called Slippery Slope in which he asks the question if providing out of game services for ISK is the start of a slippery slope:

Let's take it a step further. I don't own a hosting company. But I do have $500. Let's suppose that I'm willing to pay the hosting charges for this massive EVE gambling site. I go to the operators of this gambling website and they're amenable to giving me 50 billion ISK per year for website hosting. I go to a hosting company I know, and I buy a dedicated hosting server. I then advertise it in Sell Orders with a somewhat misleading post title. The operator of this gambling site then replies to my post saying that he wants to buy my services with ISK. We then let the post fall far down into the invisible pit of thousands of other Sell Order posts.
The gambling site gets their hosting. I get 50 billion ISK -- $1500 worth of ISK -- for $500. Is this legal? Or is it RMT?
Not so fast.
When you buy a kill-board from EVSCO (which hundreds, if not thousands of EVE players, corps, and alliances have done), you pay ISK for the in-game service, which is legal. The owners of EVSCO then pay for the website hosting of your kill-board. As their in-game business has expanded, I'm quite sure they've had to pay more RL money to their hosting company to host all those kill-boards and deal with the demand. EVSCO pays RL money and in return receives large amounts of ISK from hundreds of EVE players, corps, and alliances. Same question: is that legal? Or is it RMT?
Don't be alarmed. That sensation you're experiencing is just the slippery slope.

The summary of what I'm going to write can be written as thus: We are at the bottom of the slippery slope already, the issue has been decided. We have been at the bottom for so long some of us don't even recognize it and are taken aback when they look around and see where they are.

OK, now that the conclusion is out of the way, let's write the post.

Real Money Trading, aka RMT, is both legal and illegal in EVE Online. Legal RMT started with the allowed selling of Eve Time Codes on the forums back in the history of time, at least 7 years ago, and continued with the allowed selling of characters in the bazaar and more recently the allowed selling of out of game services. The fact you can get 600 million ISK for about $15 or, as in Ripard's example above, 50 billion ISK for $500 is irrelevant. Its legal in this game and the start of the slippery slope was the eve time codes; everything thereafter was simply applying the same principle.

What is that principle? Quite simply put, CPP is OK with someone giving money for ISK as long as someone else cannot sell ISK for money. As long as the transactions do not make a profit for a person in the 'community', then its a legal transaction.

The reason people are not allowed to sell ISK for real money profit is that it quickly becomes a business more interested in acquiring ISK to sell in greater quantities and thus encourages game damaging behaviours like farming, botting, and account hacking. In Ripard's example above, no one's real money wallet is at a higher balance other than the hosting company who is not part of the community and sold server time and thus has no interest in engaging in game damaging activities.

So RMT is alive and well and legal in EVE in certain scenarios, even if the implications of that bother people as they look at the scope it can take on.

Now the far more interesting question is if the legal RMT, all of it from time codes to hosting-for-ISK deals, is good for the game or not.