Work or pay

I bought the original Guild Wars when it came out, but never played much of it. I'm not much of a PvP guy, and the PvE wasn't so exciting. But I'm still in the Guild Wars database of users and so they still send me mail with advertising and special offers. This week I got a mail offering me to buy skill and item unlock packs. Normally when you make a character in Guild Wars you have the choice of whether you want to make a level 1 character and level him up to level 20, and gather all the possible skills yourself. Or you make a level 20 character right away, but that one only has a limited set of standard skills. Unless you pay for the skill and item unlock pack and get access to all the stuff that other players had to painstakingly find themselves. Hmmm, looks surprisingly like RMT to me.

The basic problem is always the same: you can achieve anything in a MMORPG given enough time. But some people just don't have that much time. Conveniently people with little time usually have not much time to play because they have a job, and because they have a job they have more money than somebody playing the game 16 hours a day. Thus offering the guy with little time some of the achievements that the guy with lots of time "worked" for is usually an easy sell. Gold sellers make millions of dollars that way. And of course game companies would prefer to grab that money themselves, and not leave the profit for third parties. Thus NCSoft gives you the choice in Guild Wars: Do you want to work to gather all the skills and items in the game to use them in PvP, or do you prefer to pay for them. I'm pretty sure that players who did work for them won't be happy about this offer.