Discuss.


For those of you who don't know what RMT is, it's "Real Money Trading" - the buying/selling of virtual assets for real life money.
Generally speaking, the legit player community has a negative view on RMT.

Analysis: I personally find a distinction between two different subtypes of RMT companies - honorable and dishonorable. Because I'm currently playing Aion, I'll be using Aion as an example. I generally group RMT services into three categories: Power Leveling, Gold Selling, and Item Selling. The difference between 'honorable' and 'dishonorable' RMT companies is the means by which they provide their services. For example, a dishonorable company would use bots to farm the gold they sell, whereas an honorable company would have actual people doing the farming, or buy from regular players who like to farm. (It boggles my mind, but I do know people on GW who make stacks of ecto a day legitly.) The only real distinction I can make in power leveling is whether the character is leveled using a bot script, or leveled by hand. I would also like to add that a lot of gold sites are probably untrustworthy. These are probably the same companies that spam in-game chat with advertisements.

Ethics: I don't want to go into detail, google it yourself, but the non-legit RMT companies are a pain towards the game companies. Not only because of spamming, but also because in P2P games like Aion, the botting companies are obtaining their accounts by fraudulent means as well as keylogging and hacking. The game company makes no money off of the botters' accounts but instead gets canceled payments and other fees. Anyone who would support these non-legit companies, quite frankly, I am unable to understand why.

What are your opinions on RMT? Do you think it is universally malicious, or can be separated into good/bad? Any personal experiences to share?