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Is it paternalistic to assume that the shared experience of leveling up is necessary to preserve the overall enjoying ability of an MMORPG for all its participants? If so, is it then a mistake to design MMORPGs around the concept of Runescape Gold leveling up?
If not, what other design mechanisms can be used to create shared experiences? And lastly, does any of this even "matter" as long as users are given the opportunity to segregate themselves into communities that respect a given set of social and economic rules?
EQ2 Station Exchange: "legalized" RMT
Speaking of: Sony recently released a whitepaper (.doc link) exposing some interesting stats from the Ever-quest 2 "Station Exchange" - the proprietary RMT market run by Sony itself, which is only accessible from two special EQ2 game servers. (Thanks, once again, to Raph for highlighting this.)
Some key information from the whitepaper:
Net cash includes any money that passes through the Station Exchange auction service. Total cash collected between June 2005 and June 2006 was $1.87M. Recognized revenue for the first year was $274,083.
(DJE: theoretically it could have been more, since Station Exchange is limited to just two EQ2 servers. It depends on user demand and the extent to which some long-time users may have felt rooted to their existing, pre-Station servers.)