There is one flaw in this bonds concept. currently the vast majority of member bots have there memberships paid for using stolen credit cards. runescape doesn't get to keep this money as the credit card companys simply dispute the transactions, however due to the type of purchase this is, it doesn't have a massive impact on jagex, except for the sky high credit card processing costs due to how often transactions get disputed.
with the bonds in play, these gold farmers are simply going to take to buying the bonds straight from Jagex using the same credit cards they would previously have brought memberships with. They will then sell these at a fraction of what Jagex sells them for, lets say $1 a pop. The implication of this being that people now have a black market to buy membership from, at a far cheaper rate, say $2 a month. and this is what will make this black market thrive.
From the gold farmer perspective, this process is money laundering. They purchase these bonds with stolen money (or dirty, if you will) and they pass them off to players for less, legitimate (or clean, if you will) money. Effectively, they turn $5 of dirty money, into $1 of clean money.
This is going to have a rather significant impact for Jagex, in that suddenly, they will have all these players buying memberships off the ex gold farmers, while the credit card companies dispute the initial transaction that produced the bond, resulting in jagex never receiving the $5. effectively instead of GP being introduced into the economy, Memberships are instead. crippling Jagex source of income (not to mention driving the processing fees through the roof).
Jagex could simply remove any bond from the game in which the transaction has not been honoured, but what if the bond has already been traded for an innocent players hard earned GP? This scenario which will have to eventuate, will undermine confidence in the bond system, driving the GP value of bonds down, and the farmers will rise once more.
26-Sep-2013 11:56:36
