CCP are only selling gametime. This is, after all, precisely what a MMO provider offers. It’s a currency which enables gameplay without having any direct in-game impact.

At the same time, their system has cracked down heavily on fraud.

Little annecdote: Before Eve allowed time code trading, it’s in-game currency was relatively expensive. Less than two weeks after it had enabled time code trading, it’s in-game currency prices from gold sellers had dropped by a factor of *15*, and was quite some way from base.

All games have potential problems with fraud and chargebacks. In our system nobody is really able to easily cash out to real dollars, so fraud/chargebacks from scam artists trying to make a real world profit are less of a risk.

I can’t recall any support requests for players wanting to take back trades of credits they purchased from us. We’d certainly deny those requests in any case. Once you spend your credits, they’re spent, period.

In any case, the arbitrage example is a really nice in-and-out of game mechanic. Thanks for sharing it. It’d be interesting to hear more about the implementation of the dual-credit system: do you have a problem with fraud or chargebacks? Being on the small end of the scale could help you again here, I guess. Do you have increased support requests from players wanting to take back trades of credits they purchased from you? What are your rules for dealing with those?

The important part is having the exchange and having that in-game method for people to buy gold, at free market prices, which will make it VERY hard for an external exchange to compete.

I agree that out-of-game RMT isn’t by itself amoral - it’s economics, nothing more or less. Where the amorality (if you’re feeling fire-and-brimstoney) or more to the point, the corrosive impact on gameplay comes in is where people who couldn’t give a flying frack about in-game community issues drop in, make money, drop out, and sell it on a website. The usual in-game community policing measures that players develop don’t apply, and it devolves to the developers to try to mitigate the damage through police enforcement, taking away from the limited time they have to do the rest of their jobs.

So essentially allow the players themselves to be farmers - allow the high school kids or whomever without credit cards to spend the time gathering currency. They are doing it not for real world cash but for the in-game reward - the credit currency or whatever it buys - and because they are part of that in-game community, they are less likely to exhibit the bad behavior stereotypical gold farmers do, because they value their characters and reputation.

That’s why the blind-exchange portion is critical - it makes it more difficult (I am under no delusion that it can’t happen) for external forces to farm wealth, while making it easier for internal forces (the players themselves) to do so. My hope is that would influence the players to keep the great majority of the economy internal, and thus helps innoculate the game of the negative influences of external farmers.

Hey, it’s an idea, anyway.