Ebay Bans RMT?

Thanks to my daily scan of Lum the Mad's blog, we have word (albeit somewhat rumored yet) that Ebay is going to be banning RMT (or sales of MMO items/characters/money) wholesale, with the MMO in question being Ultima Online (which does allow RMT).

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, RMT is one of the hot button topics in MMOs. In fact, at the 2005 Austin Game Conference, it spawned its own panel, which I attended. Many people are against it, quite a few people (especially IGE) are for it, and some people just don't care.

Personally, my opinion is that if RMT is going to survive, it's going to have to be internal to the game, much as SOE has done with Everquest 2 and their Station Exchange program. And let's be honest. If anyone's going to be making money off of what's in the MMOs, it should be the MMO developers themselves. I mean, heck, I'd rather pay Blizzard $5 for a Sword of Glowy Smashings than pay some Chinese gold farmer for one. Same goes for any MMO, for that matter.

And let's be honest again, it's not like you're ever going to successfully ban the practice. When (and if) Ebay bans RMT (which won't be 100% successful, just look at their bans of bootleg music and other media), that'll just push people more towards IGE and various other gold and power leveling services. Historically, any time that you attempt to outlaw something, it just goes underground. RMT going underground will do nothing but make the possibility of fraud and other shady activities become much more common. If the MMO developers enfold RMT into their games, then at least then there's some accountability.