Another look at why we buy Gold from the Chinaman.

If you play baseball, its ok to go to the sporting goods store and buy yourself the top of the line equipment to enhance your gameplay. If Hockey is your activity of choice, an expensive pair of skates and well made protection is your best bet. Perhaps you're not into sports and your hobby is to make custom dance mixes as a DJ? Investing money into the best sound system is the only way you can compete. It all sounds ok to me. How about you? The bottom line is.. If you suck at Hockey, Baseball or DJing.. No amount of money in the world is going to make you good.

So why is it when you're a video gamer and you want to compete as a top level player, its taboo and scornful to buy the best things you need to compete on a level playing field? Because the time spent collecting gear in MMORPG's is what makes a player good. Skill is secondary. It comes in the form of Dungeon How-To guides freely available around the internet and everyone knows that.  Most refuse to admit it.

In an industry where top media outlets such as IGN freely offer up cheats (exploits) to multiplayer games such as Call of Duty 4 and other high profile competitive games, its frowned upon when a gamer spends hard earned money to get around MMORPG time sinks intentionally implemented in a game by the MMO publisher? Cheating in an FPS is done to get a commanding edge over a well skilled opponent. In an MMORPG, the gear is what makes you a well skilled opponent, but cannot make you better or worse than anyone else in the same gear.

MMORPG's are fun and addictive games, but you cannot deny that for the most part, they are huge wastes of time in the long run. Take World of Warcraft for example. Once a character gets to level 70, it can take several weeks or months to get your character to position where you can effectively compete against others. Some call this a rite of passage to be able to grace the presence of those who have already invested their life away for a video game. Others, those with families or jobs with long hours that don't afford them the luxury of playing World of Warcraft six hours per day, seven days a week call it a roadblock.

If you're the core MMORPG player, right now, you are scrolling to the bottom and writing the following comment "If you can't hack it with the big kids, don't play the game!". It's ok, most people in our society are close minded and quick to go on the offensive. Consider yourself at peace with the masses.

A small percentage of our population is open to investigate the reasons why people do what they do. They are open minded to see another person's point of view and try to put themselves in the other person's situation.

When you do this, the "Why People Buy MMO Gold" debate has two very valid points on each side. You must first examine the root issue behind the booming MMO RMT industry.

MMORPG publishers rely on monthly subscriptions. Therefore, they rely on keeping their subscribers busy in the game at all costs. Once a gamer has nothing left to do in a game, they usually move on to the next one.

The MMO industry has made sure that all costs, they don't lose subscribers. To compenstate for the expensive process of creating new game content, adding new quests or new professions, they dangle carrots and stretch out the existing content as far as they possibly can. They have even coined a buzzword for the carrot dangling. They like to call it progression.

At first, Blizzard delivered progression in the form of raids where 60 people engage a dungeon for hours on end to get 1 reward for a small number of people at the end. Usually, the people fought over the rewards. Friendships were lost. Guilds were destroyed. Fortunately, you can run that same dungeon ad infinitum until all 60 people got everything they wanted. Unfortuately, because of the difficulties, the 60 people were not a set group. While some quit the game and others got frustrated and left the group, there was always a steady stream of lemmings getting attuned and geared up, so the process was a never ending one.

Great for Blizzard, who collects $15 per person each month. Bad for the players who gave up a lot of real life activities and opportunities to chase a pixelated e-carrot that was all thrown out the window with the first expansion. In the end, Blizzard realized that the 60 man raid was a failure and while it never actually hurt their bottom line, when Burning Crusade came out, they made entry level gearing out a bit easier.

On the other hand, there is balance. Balance is when a person knows they want to play a game, but understands that for whatever reason, they cannot. Maybe your job has you working 50-60 hours per week with a 1 hour commute each way. Perhaps your newborn child needs your attention more than the World of Warcraft. Maybe your college studies just don't give you the freedom to play the game for more than a couple hours a few times a week.

As the core MMO players would say at this point "Then don't play my game if you're not hardcore. I worked for everything I got and so should you!". Yes, its witty, but I can't tell you how many times we've heard it before.

Instead, to get ahead, these people turn to China to outsource the tedium and repetitiveness that is the modern MMORPG. Any accountant would tell you buying MMORPG gold and items from a 3rd party Chinaman, who I will refer to as "Uncle Chin" from here on out, is a wise financial decision.

If you get paid $20 per hour, and it takes 20 hours of gameplay to get the item(s) you desire in game and it costs $200 to pay Uncle Chin for those same items, it's more productive for you to work 20 hours, make $400 and give Uncle Chin $200. At the end of the day, you have $200 in your pocket, the gear on your character and time in game to do whatever you want, instead of chasing the gear you needed. Who's the stupid one?

The underlying blame for gold buying does not lie with the gamer. It does not lie with Uncle Chin. The blame can squarely be placed on the MMORPG publisher for creating games that drive people to spend real life money to keep up with the core gamers.

If it wasn't for the WoW RMT business, I don't think Blizzard would have quite as many active players as they do. The number of WoW players who have bought gold, powerleveling or items from Uncle Chin could reach well into the two million figure. If you dispute this claim, then ask yourself how it could be a multi billion dollar per year industry.

Are MMORPG's too hard? No. Not at all. I've played many MMORPG's and its nothing a person who failed their GED test can't master, and usually do. The problem with most of today's MMORPG's is the timesinks intentionally implemented by the publishers to milk subscribers for every last penny they can. For the publishers, time sinks are financial gains and revenue streams. Why is it ok for publishers to intentionally waste our time, but its not ok for the player to find ways around these meaningless time sinks so they can actually play the game the way they want to?