Check out all of the details of this month's Patch Notes, featuring the 16th Anniversary and VIP Renewal Update! https://mabinogi.nexon.net/news/90098/16th-anniversary-and-vip-renewal-patch-notes-march-14th
[NEW MILLETIANS] Please note that all new forum users have to be approved before posting. This process can take up to 24 hours, and we appreciate your patience.
If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the Nexon Forums Code of Conduct. You have to register before you can post, so you can log in or create a forum name above to proceed. Thank you for your visit!

Real Money Trading Enforcement Update

Comments

  • strange101strange101
    Mabinogi Rep: 925
    Posts: 6
    Member
    As mentioned, we need to know what they plan to do and how to know that they are actually going to do anything. I've been playing off and on since 2009 and for as long as I can remember there have been bots spamming a gold buying website in Dunby. They had bot bombs in game to stop gathering bots that did nothing against people spamming chat then they took the bot bombs out.

    My concern is that it might not be worth playing and here is why. I run Nowhere to Run elite as often as I get passes to try to get a Celtic Howling Chain Blade from the bears. Why not craft one? It needs 20 of an item that costs ~20m each and is stupidly rare to drop. You could farm for months and never get 20 (assuming you can get groups to run the stuff). And even if you do some of the crafting could fail and you'll need a few more. My concern now is that if I get one to drop I won't be able to sell it at the current market value for fear if being banned but if i sell it low someone else will buy it and flip it to sell ti at market value and I'll be out that gold difference.

    Why not use it myself? Because I have to enchant it (risking durability and destruction without paying real money for enchant protection potions or waiting for events to give them out). Then I need to upgrade it, remember 5-6 and 6-7 will kill it if it fails. Then it's 35k a point to repair without risking durability loss. Of course you could always use hammers to add durability...oh yeah they're only from events and gachas. This game was really built on being pay to win. The fact that this announcement came out a few days after a new gacha makes it sound like fewer people were paying nexon and more people were paying gold buyers so now it's a problem they notice.

    So nexon here's what you need to do to get rid of the need to buy gold and it is to get rid of the need to buy gachas. Stop making gacha items come prereforged or enchanted. Gachas should be cosmetic only with no game play improvements from the gear. Make enchants 100%, make special upgrades 100%, make repairs 100% and the rate based on the tier of the item. Greatly increase the droprate of rare items. Add that's for starters. Basically take a note from WoW's early play book. Once they added paid boosts their game went to crap and has never recovered.

    Remember Nexon laziness and inaction got you into this mess, diligence and decisive action is the only way out.
    SherriShakaya
  • Momma_SophieMomma_Sophie
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,575
    Posts: 290
    Member
    edited February 22, 2021
    To Edetha:
    Edetha wrote: »
    So basically, what I got from this:
    If you engage in any sort of commerce whatsoever with another player, you might be sanctioned. You may have been interacting with a RMTer, and didn't notice it.
    I saw that they said this only will apply to people who "knowingly" do something like this. Alright. Now, the question becomes: "How do you know who knows?" Nobody with a brain thinks Nexon somehow will acquire evidence to proof that someone knows what's going on when these transactions occur, so the only logical conclusion left is that they'll throw a dart and whomever it hits is just screwed.
    Also, hot take:

    RMT helps Mabi's economy more than it hurts it at this point. Mabi's economy has the upper eschelons earning SO MUCH GOLD, that the redistribution of currency to non high end players, helps the game more than the downsides from the farming bots (which mostly use instanced areas, so they don't directly encroach on others farming, like happens in other MMOs)

    I sincerely think you have this backwards. Nobody realistically (rather, "commonly") is sitting there everyday, farming up over one billion gold to buy a kraken heart. The price is obviously based upon real money value, approx. $500+. That's not to say that people aren't obtaining over one billion in liquid gold. Gachas are forever lucrative. That still requires Real Money Trading, but to Nexon instead of other players. The people who engage in RMT simply decided to cut out the middleman and RNG and give the funds straight to the source of the Kraken Heart, thereby also reducing overall cost by not having to reroll gacha 1000 times for that one rare item they'd need to afford the Kraken Heart.

    To Adeno:
    Adeno wrote: »

    I only want to address the "Multi-Clienting" part. This is a popular means that people like to use to attack the wealthy players on. The thing I want to ask is how you plan to prove who does and who does not Multiclient? You can't suggest Nexon invades someone's device to find the files. Additionally, you can't assume everyone who has alts around them is "Multiclienting." Nexon's ToS does not disallow creation of nor usage of alternate accounts alongside your own main account. It simply limits the amount you can create within a time frame. Now, I'm not going to sit here and act like a person owns eight whole computers dedicated to farming Purification Missions. It's barely believable that a person owns four laptop/desktop computers for farming dungeons/shadow missions (and I'm one of those people). Even so, we can't just assume things. This all sounds good until the gun is pointing at you, on basis of these same exact standards. It's already happening to newer players as they get restricted from literally playing the game because they were confused to be a bot or exploitative account (see Edetha's post regarding a player being restricted from dungeons).

    --General Commentary--
    The expansion of these rules is now so broad that I honestly don't see the point of having rules. I'm not stupid enough to believe that Nexon plans to go through objective reasoning methods to verify and prove that someone is indeed violating any such rule. I firmly believe this simply serves as a means to expand Nexon's justification in their actions against someone, as I've seen and read stories of innocent people claiming to be mistakenly punished for being involved with such things as RMT or botting. The ToS allows Nexon to terminate accounts at will, so I can only conclude that this is more of a PR stunt than anything else. In other words: they'll continue as they were, but now don't have to worry about backlash if they clamp down on an innocent person; they can simply justify it with "association," without disclosing whom the associate may actually be and people will simply nod their heads and praise them for their enforcement.

    Basically, nothing has been solved in doing this -- except the expansion of authoritarian reaches into our personal Mabi lives on basis of "eliminating illicit trades." You can't prove who "knows" what without mind-reading or explicit recognition of involvement and as always, the RMT market will adapt to this expansion and develop new rules of their own to protect themselves from this.

    I can't tell you what the solution is to this. There probably isn't one. I firmly believe that server merging is the root cause of all of this inflation by combining 3 servers worth of wealth into one server, RMT or not. But, that's hindsight and we can't undo it. Going forward, I'd suggest reconfiguring your own business structures in regards to item rarities and gameplay factors involving RNG and Gacha. It's a lot easier to reduce prices of items by making them more accessible to the average player (yes, this would logically curb your profits and revenue and yet I've seen enough of your financial statements over 2020 to know you'll all be fine), than to try and eliminate an underground ring of gold traffickers. You guys did a great job with Red Flame Dragon Event, which encouraged more people to do more content in exchange for more rewards from the event. It helped increase the availability of materials on the market and reduced some of the costs. It also helped people make money by supplying parts of the Bugle to the market for a ~1m profit per material instance.

    --Conclusion--
    Generally, I'm not saying not to go after the RMT traders when it's evident as to what's going on. But, realistically, this is like trying to eliminate "crime" by creating/expanding more rules that the criminals clearly will not follow (if they didn't stop 6 years ago, then they will not stop now); the rule-abiding citizens will have more to worry about, by comparison.
    SherriEdethaHabimaruShakaya
  • EdethaEdetha
    Mabinogi Rep: 1,625
    Posts: 76
    Member
    To Edetha:
    Nobody realistically (rather, "commonly") is sitting there everyday, farming up over one billion gold to buy a kraken heart.

    At that point in the economy, it's mostly earning gold through selling items.

    But yes, people are absolutely farming for that, most of the money however comes from selling OTHER things, as opposed to raw gold faucets.
  • CrimsọnCrimsọn
    Mabinogi Rep: 65,165
    Posts: 9,158
    Member
    Well it's no secret that kraken hearts pay rent. Least that's what I heard. Perhaps increase the drop rate and that ~might~ curve that market. lol.
    Shakaya
  • Momma_SophieMomma_Sophie
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,575
    Posts: 290
    Member
    edited February 23, 2021
    Crimsọn wrote: »
    Well it's no secret that kraken hearts pay rent. Least that's what I heard. Perhaps increase the drop rate and that ~might~ curve that market. lol.

    It certainly would. The Red Flame Dragon Leather needed for the Red Flame Bugle from this past event was comically cheap, because pretty much anyone -- new or old -- can grind a Shadow Mission and it doesn't take very long to complete most of them. The Golden Yarn obtained from fishing was basically a question of patience and how many computers you have, so it obviously had much higher value by comparison. The Horn dropped more commonly from higher difficulty dungeons (which obviously would see less play by comparison to shadow missions due to length or time needed to farm passes for them and clear them), so those logically would cost even more to buy from other players.

    This event basically proved a basic tenet of markets, which is that ease of access has a direct (yet inverse) correlation to price value. If they could make certain materials more generally accessible and also strategically apply the adjustments across the entirety of content in general, it would reduce the general costs of the materials and thus remove incentive to pursue RMT trading (I've even suggested creating "Swap/Exchange Shops" as an idea of what could be done). If anyone has been watching the prices of Divine Mineral Fragments on Nao, they immediately lost a chunk of value when a large portion of the RMT traders lost interest in the game. When they came back to claim the free Erg 35 catalysts from G25's events, they skyrocketed even higher than their previous 250k threshold and have only risen since. Divine Minerals are only farmable in three precise locations, through other materials that can be fragmented to obtain them (one of which provides materials so rarely seen that you'd be better off selling them for 30m - 200m and just buying the Divine Minerals) and none of them are time-efficient or RNG-friendly (unless you own gear that supplies huge DPS and/or you also have many "friends" to help you farm Purification Missions). Divine Minerals have been a staple material for people to use in RMT profiting and that's a clear example of the ridiculous amount of RNG involved with the Erg process working directly to the benefit of the RMT traders.

    All of the above is evidence that the game's over-reliance on RNG created this problem; it's a direct consequence, created by the developers, that will persist until the concept of progression is reevaluated to not simply be a dozen RNG barriers.
    EdethaCrimsọnShakaya
  • KensamaofmariKensamaofmari
    Mabinogi Rep: 34,745
    Posts: 7,909
    Member
    One of the continuing problems one created by gold farmers is the never ending demand for gold, and thus the never ending cycle of gold inflation. The farmers created a market they could exploit and get real money from. There needs to be more methods to manage supply and demand of gold and possibly get that inflation under control. I think price caps under personal shops is effective (a shop license can only hold X max amount of gold), and this may not be a popular opinion, I think price caps should be applied to auction house too. A cap for a player's total sale slots on how much gold they can actually hold.
  • HelsaHelsa
    Mabinogi Rep: 23,380
    Posts: 5,764
    Member
    Inflation will happen even if everyone is an honest actor. People make more over time; even playing the game honestly, so the money supply will ALWAYS increase. Therefore controlling inflation means more effective gold sinks. A very good way to do this is to have more of the things valued by players purchased via NPC's. That kills the private market and it's a gold sink; two birds one NPC.
    Sherri
  • GretaGreta
    Mabinogi Rep: 51,805
    Posts: 6,975
    Member
    Helsa wrote: »
    Inflation will happen even if everyone is an honest actor. People make more over time; even playing the game honestly, so the money supply will ALWAYS increase. Therefore controlling inflation means more effective gold sinks. A very good way to do this is to have more of the things valued by players purchased via NPC's. That kills the private market and it's a gold sink; two birds one NPC.

    One of best Mabinogi gold sinks keep on getting removed by Master Plan Events. This last year alone probably had like 6 months of free weapon repairs. Makes me think this is the main issue why inflation skyrocket.
    Helsa
  • HelsaHelsa
    Mabinogi Rep: 23,380
    Posts: 5,764
    Member
    Greta wrote: »
    Helsa wrote: »
    Inflation will happen even if everyone is an honest actor. People make more over time; even playing the game honestly, so the money supply will ALWAYS increase. Therefore controlling inflation means more effective gold sinks. A very good way to do this is to have more of the things valued by players purchased via NPC's. That kills the private market and it's a gold sink; two birds one NPC.

    One of best Mabinogi gold sinks keep on getting removed by Master Plan Events. This last year alone probably had like 6 months of free weapon repairs. Makes me think this is the main issue why inflation skyrocket.

    That didn't help; that's for sure. To Nexon's credit, however, adding the 100% option was good. There are only two things that contribute to the money supply at all: directly-for-gold grinding, and direct gold give-aways, from Nexon, during events; nothing else creates gold. Grinding for, say, holy water, to sell, does not create more gold; it just moves existing gold around. On a per person basis, those folks botting for gold are contributing out of proportion to "normal" people. Of the botters, I would not be surprised if there is actually only one person doing it for money. I think the rest are doing it for gold to use immediately for themselves in game. How many botters are there in total? I bet not so many. I'm not suggesting that Nexon shouldn't try to deal with these folks or that they are not having an effect, but it would not surprise me if the biggest contributor, and by far, to the money supply is grinding by honest actors because there are so many more of them.
  • Momma_SophieMomma_Sophie
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,575
    Posts: 290
    Member
    edited February 25, 2021
    --To Greta--
    Greta wrote: »
    One of best Mabinogi gold sinks keep on getting removed by Master Plan Events. This last year alone probably had like 6 months of free weapon repairs. Makes me think this is the main issue why inflation skyrocket.

    This is a major factor. The constant uplifting of naturally occurring gold sinks is causing more issues than it normally would. They've seemingly halted the issuance of in-game stimulus checks (Lucky Check Boxes) that obviously saw continual exploitation by those with multiple accounts on hand and that is good. But, the counter-balance has to exist. I know people complain about repair fees interfering with their grinds and that's relatable. But, that comes down to personal decision: people are way too careless about handling their equipment repair fees and removing fees entirely isn't a solution to that -- it just enables it.
    --To Helsa--
    Helsa wrote: »
    Inflation will happen even if everyone is an honest actor. People make more over time; even playing the game honestly, so the money supply will ALWAYS increase. Therefore controlling inflation means more effective gold sinks. A very good way to do this is to have more of the things valued by players purchased via NPC's. That kills the private market and it's a gold sink; two birds one NPC.

    You're right. Inflation does naturally occur over time, but the natural progressive increase is so slow that it's barely noticeable. It's kept in check by the many "fees" that the game has, including repairs, taxes, and upgrades, while the highest difficulty missions and dungeons barely reward us with more than 50k raw gold per chest per run (unless you use a Shadow Crystal in Shadow Missions). Yet, I can't think of a time where dramatic inflation occurred and it did not directly follow something Nexon did: Server Merge, Free Repairs, Free Gold (Lucky Checks). But, we also have to accept that introduction of new content is always going to change public perception on a material's worth.

    I think your idea of creating even more gold sinks (more taxes on daily functioning) wouldn't solve anything, because it creates more monetary barriers for the average player to deal with. I don't think introducing developer-controlled prices for materials is going to curb inflation, because you'd have to do this for all materials in the game or all you're doing is shifting values around for what isn't NPC-controlled. Nexon can't quantify the value of a material or item; this cannot be dictated down by their decree, because players value things differently.

    I say all this, because the primary reason that people grind content is exactly because individual perception of value: The Misty Red Gem and Kraken Heart sells for so much that it draws in dedicated grinders, who ensure that the materials exist in the game for those who cannot/will not grind that content. The price of those materials being so high incentivizes other less-powerful players to grind other content; they can sell off enough materials from that lesser content and buy the Gem and Heart for themselves. The materials they sell off to afford the Gem and Heart are bought by people who pursue things like Erg and/or Soluna, who put gold into the pockets of people who farm consumables and provide high-quality crafting/blacksmithing services. And in turn, those people who pursue Erg likely are the people farming the Misty Gems and Kraken Hearts in the first place. There's also the people who buy items from the Cash shop specifically to sell them off to people and rack up in-game funds needed to buy the thing they want, so this level of player-based valuing even benefits Nexon to a degree.

    This is a very, very delicate chain of marketing that we cannot simply break on a whim by shifting some of its control into the hands of Nexon, a body of people that many of us already find to lack the insight necessary to handle these types of issues. The market will simply adapt and unforeseen consequences will occur, guaranteeing price shifts in items no one could have suspected. If they were to do something like, for example, shift Ruptured Black Metals into an NPC shop and price them at, say, 7m gold each, that price ceiling has now destroyed the incentive to grind dungeons for Ruptured, because nobody can sell higher than 7m to compete with the NPC shop. They'll instead grind for rarer things and sell those off (like, Subtle Marks and Broken Magic Essence), which will gain more value because they're all now even more rarely found than Ruptured Black Metals easily found at an NPC shop.

    But, please know that I do agree with your fundamental idea of creating a new way to obtain the items; I just disagree on the options that include having Nexon directly determine an item's gold value.
    --To Kensa--
    One of the continuing problems one created by gold farmers is the never ending demand for gold, and thus the never ending cycle of gold inflation. The farmers created a market they could exploit and get real money from. There needs to be more methods to manage supply and demand of gold and possibly get that inflation under control. I think price caps under personal shops is effective (a shop license can only hold X max amount of gold), and this may not be a popular opinion, I think price caps should be applied to auction house too. A cap for a player's total sale slots on how much gold they can actually hold.

    I don't think that would help anything. Everyone gets a chunk of free Character creation cards, when starting up a new account. If you're a human, you get two more (one from each leader of the Iria Tribes). After that, Nexon allows creation of multiple account (within a time period) and people list their items on those alternate characters as well.
    CrimsọnHabimaruShakaya
  • KensamaofmariKensamaofmari
    Mabinogi Rep: 34,745
    Posts: 7,909
    Member
    Inflation is necessary for a healthy economy, but it needs to be controlled and not be like what Mabi has been for years and years. Hyperinflation. Once upon a time, you were rich if you can afford a 300k piece of clothing from a NPC store, now 300k is like lunch money.
    As soon as the game ended personal shops for prem service only, this was bound to happen as there were no controls to prevent hyperinflation at the very beginning. Gold sellers took advantage of that opportunity and we've been in this mess ever since. Both Nexon and players have allowed gold farmers/sellers to dictate the market and everyone followed.

    One example of this is what I had done in the past for sales. I cook food items and sell them, cheap affordable prices ranging just above prices of 3 star food obtainable from NPC shops, prices would increase/decrease based of quality, ingredients and steps to make the item. But never were food items worth more than 10k. I kept prices low usually between 1-5k.

    Nowadays, since I've taken a hiatus from cooking, I see upstart chefs selling some of the same food for 10x the amount. And since my cheaper food is not currently available on the market, what happens? Everyone follows suit to boost prices to the inflated levels. Why? because the demand for more gold is still controlling everyone. They need to raise the cash to be able to afford these items being sold at extorting levels.

    Price caps would at least control some of this ridiculous levels of hyperinflation.

    Yes, it can be countered that players can increase their bank caps with more characters, but after one uses up their free character slots, will they be willing to buy more cards to keep increasing that cap? Most of the player base won't. At some point, the demand for gold will drop with price caps because items will no longer be as expensive, it will also limit the amount of money players can transfer between accounts using dead bees or other items.

    Once the hyperinflation is under control, the economy would have more stable inflation.

    And one other thing is if Nexon can provide players with more crafting items and add more usage to various game resources and materials, players would be able to create a more self-sufficient in-game economy while Nexon could sell crafting blueprints in their gachas and rotate some of them and keeping some for limited times. Most people play the game to be strong or to look stylish. There is a good opportunity in my belief that players can achieve this if they can craft more of their own gear and clothes than rely solely on gachas.
  • Momma_SophieMomma_Sophie
    Mabinogi Rep: 2,575
    Posts: 290
    Member
    edited February 25, 2021
    Yes, it can be countered that players can increase their bank caps with more characters, but after one uses up their free character slots, will they be willing to buy more cards to keep increasing that cap?
    Yep. I, too, was surprised to see someone actually owned enough characters to be able to just straight-up buy a Kraken Heart off the AH for 1.2b. Then, I realized that these are the same people that likely participate in RMT and throw $2k on a Gacha and my surprise quickly faded.
    Most of the player base won't. At some point, the demand for gold will drop with price caps because items will no longer be as expensive, it will also limit the amount of money players can transfer between accounts using dead bees or other items.
    We have access to trading outside of the Auction House. Checks have always been a work-around to gold caps on transactions well before the Auction House's existence and continue to serve that purpose, even to this day. This is made more possible now that the check amount has had its cap increased for Guardian Guilds and VIP players.
    And one other thing is if Nexon can provide players with more crafting items and add more usage to various game resources and materials, players would be able to create a more self-sufficient in-game economy while Nexon could sell crafting blueprints in their gachas and rotate some of them and keeping some for limited times.
    Anytime anyone suggests creating more ways to obtain items, they'll always have my full support. But, a lot of people overlook the second half of this suggestion: If the developers do create more options, the options will almost never be what we expect. I've seen this suggestion of reissuing access to outfits via in-game manuals many times, but nobody ever addresses the obvious part where Nexon buries the manuals and materials behind walls of RNG and even dilute the proportions of other highly sought materials while they're at it; it'll be more tedious than just buying a bunch of Gacha and/or grinding up the gold needed to buy it off someone who whaled on Gacha. It won't be a simple dozen reruns of Hard Mode Alby Advanced to find the manual and the materials being something like 3 Finest Fabric and 2 Finest Leather per attempt. They'd also be cutting off their pool of dummy clothes they can use to pad their Gacha ratios.

    But, I'll be an optimist for one moment and suggest that they could introduce these manuals and patterns through something like a "Remembrance Dungeon;" it'd be a totally different piece of content that players could grind through to hunt for manuals and patterns to create forgotten fashion, separate from other content. I'd be on board with that, but it'll still be RNG'd to death.
    Most people play the game to be strong or to look stylish. There is a good opportunity in my belief that players can achieve this if they can craft more of their own gear and clothes than rely solely on gachas.

    Players achieve it now. I think the issue is that people are picky about how they get strong and how they get stylish and when it happens. Not everyone wants to use their time to grind up some valuable drops to sell off at a profit. I get it. It's not for everyone. But, I think the link between "playing the game to get ahead" and "being rewarded for your effort" has been broken somewhere and no amount of suggestions of accessibility from either of us will fix that fundamental issue, until we get back to that basic concept of general gaming. Until we do, problems of RMT will forever exist to this degree.
    KensamaofmariWolfsingerShakaya
  • HabimaruHabimaru
    Mabinogi Rep: 3,630
    Posts: 761
    Member
    One day I would like to have more free time again to be able to cover all the important points in detail.

    I will be responding in a semi-short-handed manner thusly...

    Re : Inflation
    Remove Gold altogether. Inflation will no longer happen (with Gold) and RMT loses gold-farming incentives. Yes, this does mean no more gold from selling items, nor completing missions, nor quests, nor events, and essentially letting everything else be a gold-sink or black-hole for Gold until all of the Gold has completely disappeared. P.S.: The people who mentioned those massive gold-injecting events (call them mega-welfare-cheques) are absolutely correct when they pointed it out as one of the primary reasons for price-inflations (something that I also noticed over the years of in-world experience... from what I have observed, that has a lot more to do with inflation, than anything that anybody else is doing).

    Re : Punishment versus Rehabilitation
    How ironic that we care more about in-game economies, yet, are still «paying taxes» (and even supporting and condoning it) which literally fund the biggest economy-destroying criminals the world has ever seen (sorry, one of the biggest hypocrisies I feel a need to point out). *cough*Enron*cough*bank*cough*bail*cough*outs*cough* ...welfare-queen banksters are very destructive to the economy (yet people want to complain about those who might be on food-stamps, welfare, disability, etc., as-if they were some-how more of a «drain» upon the «economy» than the parasitical-elite class).

    Anyway, that is not my point here (although I still needed to point out the hypocrisy in telling others not to harm the in-game economy whilst yet still simultaneously funding and kowtowing to real-world crooks who harm the economy in many ways that make it very difficult for any honest people to get anywhere financially in the so-called real-world), but what is important is the «Educate and you live; Punish and you die» message from on high, and, like some people have already pointed out, i]perceived[/i criminal-behaviour will continue to persist regardless of how many extra lines of punitive-legislation/rules you add/enact, and punishment is not even effective anyway (not to mention the fact that it is literally «bad karma» for you to choose to inflict punishment rather than try to educate/rehabilitate; did you know that there is a very good reason why the «Karma Coin» was even named the «Karma» Coin...?).

    As one of the original reasons and influencers behind how and why Karma-Coin came to be named thus, and the fact that you literally have a product with the word «Karma» in its name, I strongly suggest that you take into consideration what I will be mentioning below as it IS related to the very real «karmic» process, and, perhaps, you could even consult with DeVone Boggan yourself if he's still around or if you can get ahold of him. Anyway, DeVone Boggan, CEO of a Youth-Mentoring Consultancy at Oakland, California, was the brain-child of a rehabilitation-programme that succeeded in dropping the murder-rate of Richmond, California, by 77% between the years of 2007 to 2014, according to a May 2016 article published in Reader's Digest (pp 84-5). I also know of other «rehabilitation» programmes that are effective for actually reducing crime-rates but, rather than get too detailed, I am just going to say that, what they have in common, revolves around benign education for rehabilitation rather than punishment-based.

    On-line communities, simulations, etc., are a reflection of what happens out in the so-called real-world when people interact, subject to the environment in which they find themselves. For the most part, the on-line or at least in-world environment should be pleasant and relaxing enough, and so logging into the virtual-world shouldn't instill desires/feelings of people wanting to express themselves in nasty manners towards others, not to get into too much psychology or anything. Anyway, thinking back, I once was part of an on-line game where they had an interesting feature (well, they had LOTS of interesting things), one of which was a literal transporting of characters to a jail for a certain length of time (this was even publicly announced there although we might not necessarily want to make Horn-Bugle-Style server-wide announcements about who ended up getting jailed). What could jailed characters do ? Well... they stayed in the jail, obviously, for a certain length of time, and couldn't warp/recall, nor do any of that teleportation-type stuff, etc., I do think I remember that they were still allowed to communicate globally though.

    “A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.”
    ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Now, I ask, what evidence is there to prove that those so-called RMT-sellers and/or buyers are «hurting the economy» or «hurting legitimate players» as you put it or is this just a matter of a handful few minority people who are so loud and vocal that they end up sounding like a majority ? I don't necessarily know what everyone else does with their in-world Mabinogi-time, but, the people I come across always seem to be very generous or are often up for grinding/spamming certain dungeons/missions (not that I have logged in lately as I just cannot really get back into the «momentum» of things that I once had once that momentum was disrupted; I also know enough about business to know that, once a customer is lost or goes to a competitor, especially if you've done something to push them in that direction, they are extremely difficult to win back [try looking into the history of who used to spend a lot and maybe when they stopped and potential reasons as to why], and I am resourceful enough to not need to stick all of my eggs into one basket [life-experiences have necessarily pushed me into becoming this way]).

    I only mention that above-paragraph because, should I go and message absolutely everybody who might be on any and all of my friends' lists, as to whether they feel hurt or have been harmed some-how in some way by the game-economy, and I do not suspect any of my friends of being RMT-sellers nor buyers by the way, I can probably correctly predict that they will have more complaints about absurdly low drop-rates (if not the company itself), the four-man limit on dungeon-party size (if not the company itself), not having enough bags/bag-space/inventory-space/etc (if not the company itself), etc., than about some sort of inflated economy. Whilst I was upset at first about a bunch of prices suddenly sky-rocketing when I was trying to save for something, I also soon realised that it became far easier to make lots of gold by selling things (such as on the AH) during those inflationary periods than to try to buy anything with the limited gold that I had back then (also, back in the day, before the A-H came into existence, the Housing Market/Channel provided an extremely advantageous edge towards making lots and Lots and LOTS of Gold in comparison to anybody else who did not have a house... although the A-H kind of killed the Housing Market).

    Also, for the people who are constantly (and to me it even seems incessantly)... complaining about inflation, how about instead of being like those people who foolishly get into the stock-market (which I consider to be a gigantic casino-style scam in of itself given the massive number of major world-criminals on Wall-Street), then buying a bunch of stock, thinking that it's going to make you $$$, only for its value to drop/plummet, then complain that you lost all your $$$, why not exercise some better financial-discipline ? Furthermore, there will always be someone out there who will be making more $$$ than you, but so what...? What's stopping YOU from making progress towards your goal...? Why do you «care» that someone else may happen to be doing something more efficiently that you ? Are you one of those people who would go the route of Intel and engage in those anti-competitive behaviours that were directed against AMD ? [See Part 1 & Part 2 on the Intel-fiasco] I also bother to pick up everyone else's gold that they leave all over the floor (and this can actually amount to a LOT sometimes; sure, not billions in a day, but all that time you spend complaining about so-called inflation and everyone else making more gold than you, I guarantee you, you could have easily picked up a good million or more or so worth of gold just by leeching from those «quest-rush/mission-rush» types who end up clearing the whole entire mission for you in seconds anyway before you even have a chance to load a magic-spell !). And that brings us to my next set of important questions...

    ...what is the logic/basis for determining whether an activity is «legitimate/illegitimate» or not ? What is the logic/basis for claiming that someone is being «harmed» because of said activity ? Who came up with all of the «rules» and what are the logical reasonings/bases for said rules, preferably with specific definitions from actual dictionaries, even specific examples of actual harm, if any ? Historically, the word «crime» referred to activities that caused/inflicted some sort of injury/suffering/damage/harm to person/property, but, due to the fraudulent-conveyance of legalese, that very word got re-defined in a manner of George Orwell's 1984 to basically mean... people like me who are forced to question the logic behind why people are doing what they do or believing what they believe (/face-palm & /head-desk). I cannot say that I feel like what they do has caused me «harm» (whilst I was upset at first when «inflation» first occured in Mabinogi, I assure you, the sole reason for that massive-inflation was due to Events that artificially pumped up the gold-supply and I have been around since 2009 to see those «gold-seller bots» and, even with the existence of those annoying bots that I had to keep black-listing or just not go to those towns altogether, I had NEVER seen «hyper-inflation» occur UNTIL there were those rain-cheques-from-the-sky-into-everyone's-inventory events so don't blame me for being «skeptical» about the very basis behind everyone's «conspiracy theories» revolving around gold-botters being more responsible for «harming the economy» than those very Nexon-sponsored events themselves).

    Argh, gah, I know I had something else important to add (probably), but, brain-scramble. Perhaps another day.