Time for some more napkin math.
Premise
This post is meant to illustrate the increased RMT market potential made possible by the recent freehold changes.
Allowing player sales - and especially direct sales - of freeholds opens a huge new market for RMT in Ashes, on top of the existing ones for powerful items and in-node housing, and of course gold. The recent changes that increase both scarcity and prices of those freeholds further increases the market potential and thus the incentives for the RMT companies.
Intrepid has continously and vehemently promised us no P2W in Ashes. From a customer point of view this means two things:
- The company doesn't introduce P2W themselves. Unless you believe cosmetics are P2W, I think so far so good. We still have to see the rewards from the monster coin events, since they'll be selling monster coins too, but I hope it's only cosmetic rewards.
- The company has to stop RMT from happening to a degree that it seriously affects the game. From a player point of view there is no actual difference between the company directly selling power, or by failing to act allowing 3rd party vendors selling it. The end result would be the same; the game is P2W. Intrepid will have live GMs and systems in place to detect RMT, and I believe they are sincere in their desire to combat it.
Freeholds, in their current form, are going to be gold and power printing machines, because without them there is no endgame crafting possible in the game, which is where all the best gear comes from.
Napkin Math
I'm declaring the following to be true for this post:
- Number of freeholds on a server: 2000 (based on Steven's "low thousands" post and my own napkin math)
- Number of max accounts per server at launch: 15,000 (also a statement from Intrepid)
- Numbers of total players at launch: 1 million (again, based on Steven's own comments)
- Numbers of servers at launch: 1,000,000/15,000 = 66.67 which I will round up to 70 because not all servers will be 100% full.
- Average RMT price for a freehold = US$ 1000.
These are all conservative numbers and estimates.
Some freeholds might be cheaper, but the freeholds in prime locations will easily fetch thousands of dollars, especially if the stations and buildings transfer over as well. There are many players out there who have the money to pay for that, and indeed pay for several freeholds for their alt accounts too. It's a big ocean with plenty of whales.
So, 2000 freeholds per server costing $1000 on 70 servers:
2000 x 1000 x 70 =
140 million dollars
140M in increased market potential just from freeholds alone, that has been added by this decision by Intrepid. That's enough money to make a new MMORPG. And that is a conservative estimate. Mind you, it's the total market
potential, not the actual market share the RMT'ers are able to get a hold of. Regular players will obviously manage to snag many themselves, but even the big, sweaty guilds will have tough competition from the RMT crowd.
However, it's enough money that those companies will hire several hundred more professional gold farmers in Indonesia or elsewhere, because the potential for profit is so big. Some might try botting as well of course, but labour is fairly cheap in some places and much safer from detection.
It's also a renewable source of income for those companies, since freeholds are lost and have to be acquired again.
In other words, Intrepid has created a massive pressure point for RMT by allowing player sales of freeholds again. They'll have to spend a lot of resources to effectively combat it, because I am willing to bet that with direct sales, players will still be paying large amounts of gold ingame on top of the $1000 out of the game for the transaction to even take place.
I hope Intrepid will have a smart and dedicated team of people solely hired to combat this, because if it becomes rampant, they will have made the game P2W and failed their promise.
Mitigation
The best mitigation is to disallow player sales of freeholds entirely. That removes a 140 million dollar RMT market potential right there.
The next best thing is to disallow direct sales. This makes the math fuzzy, because there is still going to be a huge market potential, but it will be a part of the overall gold selling market potential. Some of the RMT companies might use the Freeholds as intended to generate gold that they then resell to players.
Decreasing the size of freeholds and increasing their overall numbers will do a lot of good as well. The easier it is to own a piece of land in Verra, the lower the demand for RMT.
Decoupling the master and grandmaster tiers of the processing branch from being tied to freeholds only will also help.
And of course any measures from the anti-RMT team at Intrepid that successfully combats RMT will be essential.
TL;DR: Intrepid has conservatively added 140 million dollars in RMT market potential with the current freehold change.
