I've been a regular lurker on this site for a while but I wanted to step in here and dispel something that's just plain not true - I don't have my name highlighted here, but anyone that doubts it's me can email me at
jsmedley@soe.sony.com and I'll happily reply.
We aren't going to be allowing RMT in any way, shape or form on the non-exchange enabled EQ II servers. Period. End of statement. If we catch people, we ban them and have been for a long time now. The truth of the matter is it's very difficult to combat them, but we have people at SOE who fight the good fight each and every day. In the near future you're going to see us becoming a lot more public about this then we ever have been. I think we've done a bad job at communicating just how seriously we take this fight.
We're interested in working with LiveGamer because they are unique in the RMT world due to the fact that they are pledging (and are putting technology behind it) to not buy from farmers. Farmers are the bane of our existence at SOE. They cause us endless amounts of grief and do real financial damage in a meaningful way.
What do I mean by that?
Many of them use stolen credit cards, obtained by unsuspecting users who give them credit card #'s to purchase in-game gold. I'm not saying all of the RMT shops out there use stolen credit cards, but a LOT of them do. Your credit card is absolutely not safe in their hands.
In addition we recieve large scale (over $500k so far) fines for chargebacks that these scumbag farmers routinely do. They purchase a new account.. use it for a month and then call the credit card company to say "I never paid for this". Over time, as the # of these incidents rise we get fined by the credit card companies. And it's not just us, other large MMO companies are seeing exactly the same problem.
In any event, I wanted to stop in and at least set the record straight - you aren't going to be seeing RMT allowed on the non-exchange enabled servers.
John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment