Real World Trade In Maplestory Private Servers

You can buy a lot of things with real life money – but you should be able to buy anything?  Are there things that you should earn – not buy? In this topic we are going to discuss real world trade (also known as RWT), and whether or not Maplestory Private Server items/services are something you should be able to buy with real world money.

Defining Real World Trade

On the surface, RWT is the act of trading anything that is not directly tied to Maplestory Private Server gameplay for anything that is linked to gameplay.  So for example, paying US dollars for in game equips, mesos, or services like leech would count as real world trade.  

Paying for in game items and services for anything earned in game, however, would not constitute RWT and would widely be considered fair play.

Real World Trade and Pay2Win

Real world trade and Pay2Win are very similar in that they share the same problematic consequences.  They both make the Maplestory Private Server non competitive as they both allow for people to significantly progress without actually working hard on the server.  However, RWT is especially bad in that it creates incentives to exploit the server for real profit.

Real World Trade encourages Exploit Discovery and Abuse

When there is an option to trade in game items for real world money, people are incentivized to find ways to abuse maplestory private servers and create meso / item exploits.  Once an exploit is found, a player can simply gain “free mesos / items” and then sell those free mesos / items to get “free” real world money.  

Some players have even been doing this on mapleroyals for years and have earned significant money from doing so.  

This adds a second level of uncompetitiveness to the Maplestory Private Server.  Not only can some players get ahead of you buy paying real money, other players can get ahead of you by straight up cheating!

What can we do about it?

To be honest, there isn’t a solution to RWT.  The only real way to fix “RWT” is to make it so people who try to do it cannot profit, and this is simply not possible.  One feasible way to attempt this is to make all items untradeable, but then people will just sell accounts.  

At the end of the day RWT is like a pest in your house that you can’t eradicate.  You can employ pesticides to keep the problem under control but at the end of the day, there will always be some real world traders hiding in the shadows.

How To Discourage Real World Trade

Although we cannot stop RWT from occurring, we can try to do some things to limit it.

Make Real World Trade a Bannable Offense

At the very least, by making RWT a bannable offense, you can pressure people into not doing it.  Also, you can probably catch people who blatantly RWT – though it is unlikely you will be able to catch everyone.

Make Users Aware That You Have Logs Of the server

Simply posting a “mapletip” (basically an occasional ingame chat popup) claiming that you have ways to track RWT would make people think twice about breaking the rule (whether or not you can actually track real world trade).  A common way to track real world trade would be to keep logs of the server, like trade logs, drop logs of specific items, etc.

Foster A Community That Looks down on Real World Trade

This is a fairly difficult thing to implement.  But, if you were somehow able to create a community that as a whole found real world trade disgraceful, the social pressure exerted by the community would turn a lot of potential RWT buyers away from participating in RWT.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the problem with RWT is not that it makes the server uncompetitive, but that it incentivizes exploits and bug abuse to unfairly create items / mesos in maplestory private server.  After all, there are a lot of people would love to simply get free money.

There isn’t any hard solution to completely fix the problem, and the best that we can do is attempt to discourage real world trade via community building and rule enforcement.