Debate about RMT in Haven and Hearth

[Sevenless]

League of legends is a JOKE competitively because of microtansactions. But for a casual game the system is bearable but only due to the nature of the game. Wouldn't work in a mmo. Also the number of games where microtransactions don't affect balance is dismal.

As for devs needing to eat sure they do and some need to pave their pools with gold. See blizzard who doesn't get enough money from their 10+ million subscribers who pay 15 dollars a month but they felt the need to implement real money auction house in diablo 3 making it a bad joke, and it's just the begining if the fools bite (and they will) next it will be in competitive games (because diablo isn't much of one the pvp there has historically been not a focus).

Utterly disagree about LoL and competitiveness. Mostly because anyone who is good enough to actually compete spends far more time in game than is required to get everything you need. If you're talking mid ranks, there might be some issues but they're easily solved by building standardized rune sets for champs that are probably 90% as effective as the "ideal" runesets the pros use.

And eh, I really don't see anything wrong with what blizzard is doing, especially if it's a PvE oriented game. That shit happened in shady websites all the time. Why not legitimately harness it and generate revenue off it. Making it legal probably won't increase how often it happens and will save the company money (I view it same as legalizing drugs, generally speaking usage rates don't go up, but policiing costs go down).

As a hopeful future dev of a game, I've spent a fair bit of time analyzing these things.

[Avu]

How about dota and hon pros that would want to switch to lol they'd certainly wouldn't need as much time in lol to play it at a competitive level that they would unlock every hero and rune. And heroes matter too, what if only certain heroes are effective counters against others and unless you own them all you're basically starting with a big handicap.

And your drug analogy is extremely tenuous at best. Only barely works in pve. If you want a better one it would be legalizing performance enhancing drugs in competitions. Would a non drug user athlete be able to just shrug it off and say it's ok since we can't police it 100%?

[Saif_Mahlik]

I'd rather donate the money to the game instead.

[Jackard]

Also, nothing of this is yours Ramo. So how can you sell something that belongs to another person? The people buying are just plain stupid and I am torn between my sense of honor to protect them from making dumb decisions or watch them and laugh. To sum it up people are selling something that doesn't belong to them to people who are often probably not allowed to make a contract at all for prices that are ridiculous given the current status of the game and thus they are also breaking the game even more by making it pay2win. No problem at all, you are right.

not sure if i read this right

but laundering stolen virtual goods for real money sounds like absurdist humor