Hi there, fellow players!
Please excuse me for my english (it’s not my native language) and for that wall of text. But, I hope, some of my thoughts might be helpful.
So… Trade. Again. Well, it’s quite disappointing decision developers have made about trading, so that’s, for sure, not the last trade-related topic.
My point is, fair players should not be punished for what bad guys did (or might do).
Two thoughts:
1. If you want to counter RMT, try to adopt the demand. I mean, who creates the demand? People, who want to spend some money to get some ingame goods. Well, I think, the first step should be to make this option legal and give people the way to buy ingame stuff officially. I mean, let people buy ingame goods for real money. But let those money flow into the developers pockets. That’s fair enough, right?
I see the solution in truly and fully free market. Let everyone trade everything! Make everything tradable. Remove all restrictions (like those stupid potential thing). Well, okay, if some dude wants to bind some stuff to his account - let him. Let “untradable” be an option. Just to ensure your stuff from unauthorized access. But by default - everything is tradable! And the main part is - premium stuff should be tradable too. This is where developers monopoly for RMT comes. So, if someone want to get ingame stuff for real money, he should buy for real money something premium, then sell it for silver, then buy whatever he wants. Thats quite fair for those who don’t want to spend money too: they will be able to buy premium whatevers with in-game currency.
That’s, actually, EVE Online’s solution. That what the game with greatest economy have came to.
2. If you want to counter RMT, make people fear. Ban whoever involved in RMT. And make it public. People must know, that if they are buying something illegally, they risk to loose everything. I mean, they will be eventually caught and banned.
So, fear to do it illegally and option to do it fully legally should work. That’s what I believe.
But what is main: people should not suffer. Fair players should not be punished. Market should be free. Players should be able to buy whatever they cant get by themselves. Friends should be able to share their stuff, to do things together.
Talking about inflation at free market: we have a lot of good instruments to counter it without restrictions. For example, we should repair our equipment. That makes equipment consumable. And that’s great! Developers can just make top level items very expensive in use. They can adjust repair prices. And that’s a great instrument to counter in-game inflation. So, the market can be controlled with such little and smart instruments. No restrictions are needed.