ZT Online: Chinese MMO that's part casino

ZT Online is a wildly popular Chinese massively multiplayer online RPG with really different game-mechanics, a combination of casino, revenge-fantasy and VIP lounge:

Lu Yang received an excellent professional education, her husband is a businessman, and she has substantial financial assets. To her, money has never been a problem, but she still calls some well-regarded players in the game "RMB gamers" in frustration. Though she has invested tens of thousands of yuan in the game, she has suffered defeat after defeat due to the fact that others are more willing to spend, and to spend much more money than she is.

Like ZT Online creator Shi Yuzhu says, this is a game well-suited to the rich. In this world, the authority to bully others and the legal right to harm them are both for sale...

Good equipment means money. Unlike other games, in this game there are no items dropped when killing monsters or completing missions. "We all want the best," said Lu Yang. "You have to go to the system's shops to buy materials, and then use the system smith to make them. Or, you could go gambling."

"Gambling" means "opening the treasure chest." Gamers can buy keys and chests from the system for cheap: one yuan per set. When the key is applied to the chest, the screen will display a glittering chest opening. All kinds of materials and equipment spin inside the chest like the drums on a slot machine as the wheel of light spins. Where it stops indicates what you've won. Chests will frequently contain the high-class equipment that gamers desire, but the spinning light wheel always passes over them.

Lu Yang recalls that during her craziest period she was like a gambler in a casino. She would shout at the screen the name of the item she wanted, like "ebony, ebony," or some high-class material, but ultimately she would obtain nothing but a pittance of experience. Ebony, or that powerful "ring of the nether world," remained in the chest, gleaming seductively.

Link (Thanks, Julian!)

• [shaolincowboy]

  This is quoted from http://www.killscreenpoetry.com:

  According to China Daily, Shi (creator of ZT Online) spends 10 to 15 hours a day gaming. He knows MMORPGs back-to-front, and knows how to attract gamers. He’s hired a marketing team of 2500 people to promote the game in China’s popular internet cafes – through word-of-mouth, advertising, and strange tactics involving beautiful women, like this:

  Shi is also hiring a number of attractive female players to play in Internet cafes. “We are giving them virtual golden coins worth 6,000 yuan per year, which are equal to 500 yuan in the real world, to encourage them to play and stay in the games,” he says. His ultimate goal is to make the game more fun and lure more male players, especially first time gamers. “In fact, in China’s cyberspace many male players are very willing to pay the bills for their female counterparts”, he says.

  …..hmmmm, interesting marketing tactic.

• [Enochrewt]

  RMB? Real Money Buyer? Is that what they mean? The author really should learn how to introduce an acronym in an article.

  Anyway, it sounds like they took everything I hate about MMOs and compressed it into one game.

  I wonder if you can sell the stuff you win gambling for real money. Or is it a one way proposition and the developer gets all the cash?

• [Joe MommaSan]

  In this world, the authority to bully others and the legal right to harm them are both for sale…

  Hmmm. Sounds suspiciously like OUR world, although most people would never admit it.

• [Santa’s Knee]

  In this world, the authority to bully others and the legal right to harm them are both for sale…

  “World of Blackwatercraft”…?

• [StCredZero]

  All MMOs are like casinos. They all use variable schedule of reward to addict you. Just about anyone I know who plays MMOs gets pulled into doing repetitive actions that occasionally results in gaining a valuable item. Also like casinos, they are very artificial environments that consist mainly of glitzy/pretty surfaces with little intellectually interesting content – apart from various games which are meticulously rigged by the owners. (In MMOs, they call this “balanced.”)

  I know how to cure the MMO. In order to get some of the really interesting complexity of the real world, you need to use the same mechanisms that drive complexity in the real world. Everything in the game needs to be Emergent. Everything has to be designable/playable/scriptable by the users, or it must evolve using genetic algorithms. I am currently writing this game.

• [sylkworm]

  1) RMB = Renminbi (i.e. the chinese currency)
  2) Many of you don’t seem to understand that you pay for these treasure chests with real-world money. It’s like if you fired up WoW, and instead of spending months gearing up and working together with 25 other people, you just paypal’ed Blizzard $5 and got a roll at Illidan’s loot.
  3) It’s not exactly like casino gambling because the game doesn’t official provide a way to exchange in-game money back into real-world money, although it surely happens.

• [Mindpowered]

  No it’s far more like a virtual arms race, stoked by the games creators. If you spend the money, you will get rewarded. If you don’t you’ll be crushed.

  It’s also raises an interesting point. This game was designed for a Chinese market, and implicit in that, is that Western gamers would find the “buy your way to the top” mentality abhorrent. Is this true?

• [HaltingPoint]

  Is it just me or does this seem like an easy to way potentially avoid gambling regulations while fixing the games however you like?

  Given that MMORPGs are like a giant virtual Skinner Box (a great article on that can be found here: http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/skinner.html), it deeply concerns me that people are utilizing them to leverage another equally addictive game.

  Being from the U.S. all I can say now is that I’m so glad that for the most part us this style of pay-per-loot MMO isn’t popular and hasn’t taken over the market here yet.

• [forgeweld]

  Funny how making the game more like real life spoils the fun.

• [Lalo Landa]

  I don’t know why while reading the article every time “reincarnate level X” popped up I thought “operating thetan”…anyway…

• [sylkworm]

  @Mindpowered: In a sense, such a virtual arms race already exists in most MMO’s. Currently, it’s determined by how many hours you are willing to devote to playing the game, to a serious raiding (which at certain levels can rival that of a part-time job), and otherwise grinding for the best gear. Given how many gold-selling companies there are, I don’t think it would be that much of a stretch to actually allow people to pay directly for items.

  I suspect that part of the reason why the game uses such a business model is because of the rampart software piracy that still exists in China, as well as the lack of easy accessibility to credit cards for most players, many of whom don’t own their own personal computers (they use e-bars). In this environment, the traditional sales-by-game-unit or pay-by-subscription models can be difficult to enforce.

• [Remus Shepherd]

  I think you missed the point in this one, Cory. The ‘gambling’ in ZT Online is like random rare loot drops in any other MMO — the treasure-chest dispensers were pioneered in Everquest (and maybe Ultima Online), so it’s a very old mechanic.

  The point of this article was that ZT Online is the ultimate evolution of many common trends in online gaming: Player-organized PVP content, censorship of dissenters, and game mechanics finely tuned to suck as much money from the players as possible.

  It’s an excellent article about online gaming, especially in asia. But aside from the addictive quality of these games, they have nothing to do with casinos.