Hello all, I thought I would stop by and take a second to highlight the insanity that is "the war on RMT", as well as illuminate a little into why it occurs, just how lucrative it has been to those involved, and perhaps we may even chance a quick glimmer into the root of it's existance; human greed. A good starting point would be to gather data and try to figure out what happened on live and why. Below should be a good starting point:
http://www.azzor.com/article/2006/05...-gold-industry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGE
http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualw...urrentPage=all
Fast forward a couple of years (2009) and we have P99 developed and opened up to the public. It takes a couple of years for items and plat to accumulate but eventually someone realizes that with a ratio of dollars to plat that is 2.5 to 1000 making money should be fairly trivial. How much money do you have in your P99 bank account? 20k? 100k? 400k? On the current market 500k would be worth roughly $200. If people are duping items valued at $200 by simply creating server lag, roughly how much real money are these individuals making?
This has been going on for 2-3 weeks now, and even if they were duping 1 AoN a day (not likely) for 15 days they would still be on pace to make 6k this month alone. For no more effort than causing the server to lag. Even if they are caught and banned, that money is still in their bank accounts and the damage to the server is done.
How long before the next guy comes along and figures out a better way to do it? Couple days? Couple weeks? It doesn't matter because as long as the current strategy to fight the war on RMT continues, things will not change. It is simply to lucrative not to attempt to exploit and game the system. Where there are buyers, there will always be an entreprenuing individual willing to sell. It's not going away anytime soon.