Raph Koster has been talking recently about RMT (real-money trading, or buying in-game items and currency for actual cash, often from gold-farmers) in MMORPGs. And beyond the basic principle of ‘It’s not FAIR!’ I really don’t see what the problem is.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. But the real impact of RMT to 99.9% of MMO players isn’t the fact that player X is more powerful than he ought to be, it’s gold-farmers and spammers in the game-world. And during a particularly over-spammed session in Azeroth this afternoon, I began to wonder if there isn’t a solution.

Imagine the ‘open a ticket’ or ‘summon a GM’ box had a special button: ‘report spammer/gold farmer’. You target the offender and click the button. It links directly to a human moderator who can inspect the target’s behaviour or recent dialogue, and flag them as ‘spammer’ or ‘farmer’.

That gets the offender account banned, of course, but it does one other thing: the in-world character instantly becomes a target, worth the same amount of experience points as a decent-ish quest to the PC that kills them. So what was previously a nuisance to PCs suddenly becomes an opportunity. And I reckon at the cost of a couple of mods’ salaries, you could clear your MMO of offenders in a month.

Merry Christmas, one and all.