TERA Indirectly Enters the RMT Gold Market

En Masse is “drawing a line” in the sand against gold farmers and real-money-traders with the introduction of Chronoscrolls.  What exactly are Chronoscrolls? They’re in-game items players can use to purchase more game time in TERA, with each Chronoscroll being equivalent to one-month. Chronoscroll can be purchased from the TERA website then can either be used to extend game time or can be sold to other players for in-game gold.

In essence, chronoscrolls allow players to get more gold when they need it by helping other players play for free! This system undercuts the value of gold farming and real-money trading, making TERA a less profitable place for criminals to do business. The bad guys don’t want more game time—they’re already using stolen credit cards and stolen accounts to get free game time. By exchanging a chronoscroll for gold instead of purchasing it from the bad guys, you’ll be eliminating the market that makes it so attractive for these criminals to cause problems.

Players can only sell chronoscrolls for gold

Now let me get this straight, if I buy a Chronoscroll for $10 and it sells for 500 gold in-game, doesn’t that mean I’m basically buying gold from En Masse? How is that not gold selling? It’s basically going to become a second in-game currently tied to real money.

While I agree this will definitely kill the gold farming market, En Masse is basically monopolizing on its own in-game currency and becoming the only gold seller on the market. En Masse is not walking on the thin line, it has leaped over it.

They can argue that the more people that buy Chronoscrolls, the less valuable they become in-game, but they will never be worth less than the subscription cost. If the value of Chronoscrolls starts to dip below that, players will stop purchasing them, which will slowing increase the demand and the cost of Chronoscrolls will again rise.

For example, lets say an epic item was selling for 500 gold in the auction house and Chronoscrolls were selling for 500 gold.  That means it would cost you $10 to buy that item.  Now lets say the market gets saturated with Chronoscrolls and the value goes down to 100 gold.  No one is going to spend $50 to buy an epic item.  So people will stop buying Chronoscrolls, the demand will rise as will the gold value of Chronoscrolls, where eventually it will hit a happy medium and the price of Chronoscrolls will only fluctuate slightly.

I had previously come out in favor of Blizzards move to allow players to buy/sell their in-game items for real money with Diablo 3 and this falls along the same lines. En Masse is not adding any gold into TERA, so their won’t be any gold inflation due to this, they are simply allowing a trading system where a subscription can be sold for in-game gold.

For those players strictly against any RMT, this is just another example of how the MMO industry is starting to slowly make its way into the RMT market, even if they do try to hid the fact they are.