Originally posted by paradyme Originally posted by Jodokai I'm not going to argue the laws of economics with anyone (they are obvious so you either get it or you don't) but people have been buying money on ebay for as long as there has been ebay and MMO's, and NOTHING like what is described has happened. There have always been "newbie resouces" left for the non-ebayers. This whole thing is just a slippery-slope argument that has no validity, and plenty of proof to the contrary.
You keep saying that but I havn't seen any proof from you.
You want proof? Do an ebay search for Stwars Galaxies Credits, then do a search for Everquest Gold. You'll find tons of aucitons for this stuff, and the economy is the same now as it has been. New players can buy the new guns they need until they get to the level where they can make the money to by the high end stuff, just like it always has been. Why would you think WoW would be any different?.
This whole thing gets blown out of proporiton by people that don't think it's right to buy on ebay. Again I'm not going to argue the ethics of it, but what it boils down to is there is a group of people that think buying money on ebay is wrong and it isn't fair. They worked for thier gold why should someone else take the easy road. When they make that argument publicly, they get attacked by the people that like selling or buying gold on ebay.
This forces the Con group to come up with all sorts of reasons why buying them is evil. The argument that "it's not fair", while perfectly valid, doesn't seem strong enough to sway opinions, so they resort to scare tactics. "The economy will be ruined, the world will end and there will be total anarachy" sounds much more convincing than: "It's not fair".
So again the only thing that can really jack up an economy is money duping, and even that is to a limited extent.
If you have an economy where money just appears out of nowhere you will always have a high inflation. Prices will always escalate unless there is some kind of mechanism to withdraw excess money out of the economy (taxes, regular expenses, etc) with a significant effect.
Selling items on Ebay will make it worse, but the problems that need to be adressed in every dynamic MMORPG economy are more basic than that.
I cant believe that thousands of idiots are going to type /signed and think they are having an impact.
It just goes to show that you cant bring some people out of their fantasy world.
People will always Ebay items and characters until you come up with a game where: a) there is no grind to level 2342343242 b) the endgame is accessable to everyone from the start (yes I know that kind of destroys the def. of endgame)
Some people dont want to play 90 levels of crap to get to the real game...but they do like the world and the genre. Can you blame them? I wont.
And as for farmed gold...thats another inherent problem of MMOs that Blizzard should working on fixing VIA THE IN-GAME GAMEPLAY. A game could be created with scarcity and economic controls, but they didnt do it this time. So the ubah will always be ubah. High level guys will always have better gear than you...just like in EQ1. And the lowly will pay to get upgraded. Dont hate people because they just want to have as much fun as people with 90000 hours to play.
my understanding in WoW ATM is that the process of getting income happens within THE NATURAL FLOW OF THE GAME. Now, sit back and think about what i just said. if u wana go grind some xp solo your going to obtain gold while u do this. the idea is that in any mmo game there should never be a time where the thought goes thro my head "shiz i gota go earn $$$" and every game that has that in it is a dead game. it is dead because ITS NOT A GAME , ITS A JOB.
After playing ffxi , for me a great mmo game is as follows.
No time sink, I get to do what i want when i want. If i wana go logon for 2 hours and customize/xp my toon BY MYSELF or WITH OTHERS that should be MY CHOICE. No other game offers that but WoW. Go play any of the other eq clones? you depend on others and frankly that blows. Basicly what i want in mmo is a very good single player RPG but to have the high end / raid content for which i need to work with others but outside of that, my time is my own. WoW is the first mmorpg to give GAMERS FREEDOM. You name me any other mmo game where you can just logon and do what you want? shiz i couldnt do that in eqpc nor ffxi. If you gota wait hours to go do something then thats not content and reading a good novel is different then reading the damn phone book... EQ/SOE mmo games have always been the nynex yellow pages of rpgs... If i sound a little grumpy then i am because I WANT MY 4 YEARS BACK.
this is what ruined lineage2 for most people, ebay, ige.com (wich advertises on this site), farmers and bots... and to top it of a usless NCinteractive staff :26 ...
majority of players that left l2 for wow did it becaus of herrasing, rude farmers, ebay and ige, and a totaly screwed up economy, saying that Blizzard would protect its economy and its game. as much as i love to be right, it actualy sux to be right in this case. chances are that wow will go economy wise the same way as l2 ...
i'we played NA wow since the start, it was insane in the open beta and heaven for the first few weeks of retail, howewer since then the game went downwords... unlike most people that complain now about the state of the game, i left and am looking forward to a new one D&L
best wishes to people who stayed with wow, the ones that like the game and enjoy playing it... as far as farmers, bots, ebayers and fanbois go... you can drop dead
Just my 2 cents on the topic (I read most of the thread and I'm not sure if this has already been said) but I've seen first hand how account buying, gil selling, item selling has damn near destroyed FFXI. I've recently left the game and I'm looking to perhaps try WoW. SE did however ban 800 accounts fairly recently to fight their in game economy problems. I think it's too little too late, a problem like this must be adressed as FAST as possible. The price of in game items is not only based on the quality of the item but the supply and demand. In FFXI for instance, during my 9-12 months there I saw some items triple in price, several going up into the millions. It's at the point where many items worth having are almost unattainable. Many items are dropped by "notorious monsters" are camped around the clock so not only do you have to worry about getting the drop if you bag the monster, you have to hope you beat out 10-50 campers going for the same NM. I hope WoW attacks this problem viciously right from the start. Make the penalty for selling items, gold, etc SO SEVERE people wouldn't even consider doing it. I'm talking not only a ban but legal fees, fines, things of that nature. You ban a seller's account, they make a new one and set up shop all over again. Perhaps they should crack down on the BUYERS? I hate to see this turn into a witch hunt but something has to be done to keep MMORPG's fun for everyone.
Bah who cares if people sell ingame stuff for real life money. Companies that run these games should just do it themselves. There is obviously enough people buying this stuff to make it profitable (IGE), just put em out of business by offering it. If people are foolish enough to spend rl cash for a game then let them. I could care less how it affects the game (it is a game after all, not real life). It didn't ruin my fun in UO, SWG, EQ2, or thus far in WoW.
Originally posted by Johnark Yes it does ruin the economy!!! It's not Level 60 players that are buying Gold on Ebay! It's NOOBS that are buying Gold on ebay!!! They are the cheaters that start at level 1 with 300 Gold on hand, go to the auction hall, buyout all the Weapons, armors and 16 Slot bags they need, thus making us the non-cheating players have a hard time finding good weapons to buy! When the sellers notice they can sell items for a higher price and it will be bought out, it causes inflation for the non-cheaters while the cheaters rejoice. Take Linen! It used to be so cheap for a stack! Now they cost as much as buying wool these days! And it will keep increasing as long as noobs can still buy 300 gold for 50$ on ebay. Think about it. Someone sells a Rare blue item on the Auction hall at an insane price. If there was no cheaters, no one would of bought that rare item, so the next day, the seller would put it back on the AH for cheaper,
So not true. At best you could argue that is simply accelerates the process. As was already mentioned the money is in the game, right? So here you are level 60 and wanting to start a new toon. You then buy the items for your new character with your old one. You then transfer the items to the new character and some money. So unless you are going to prevent older characters from transfering money and items to lower level characters you still are going to have inflation.
The problem with most gaming economies is inflation. The reason is that the level of gold in the game is constantly decreasing. This lowers the value of gold and will lead to the raising of prices. No matter how well off the economy starts it will go bad unless there is some way to take out most of the wealth put into the world in the first place.
Given how pathetically easy it is to level in WoW anyway, the economy will suffer more than others because of inflation. Instead of trying to prevent those from selling gold, perhaps suggesting ways for WoW to fix the economy would be better. Because whether the money come to the level 1 from his level 60 alt, or from ebay he is still going to get the money.
Originally posted by Jodokai City of Heroes you can log on do what you want for a few minutes solo or with groups and log off. Funny how similar the two games are.
that's because the main ground philosophy is the same. They looked at old MMorpgs and asked themselves "what is the single thing the majority of players hate?" Dowtime in a game. having to wait hours for a group cause that is the only way to do things.And so they decided to be off with it.
What the second thing most gamers hate in a game? Repetitive grind. do same thing over and over for no reason at all. And so here comes missions and quests. In that respect, WoW got the upper hand as CoH didn't have a full mission oriented game (you can do missions, yes, but they are not enough to bring you from level 1 to max. you have to grind at a certain point.. actually more at certain points...like at level 24, or level 14 there is a level gap in which your old contacts are out of missions and your new ones tell you to get back at 15/25, maybe it changed now? i have seen just feature 1 eh ) but it tried its best.
I wager that other future mmorpg will be done in the same way.
Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa are already getting out the third most hated thing in games: long, boring, uneventful travelling times.
As for the economy, while it is true that money is self generated and as such a certain amount of inflaction is compulsory, i also believe that the ebay process ACCELERATE such thing and makes it much worse for the casual gamers that are not level 60 and won't be for months.
As such, i am quite against it.
have a nice day
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime"
Originally posted by Jodokai City of Heroes you can log on do what you want for a few minutes solo or with groups and log off. Funny how similar the two games are.
that's because the main ground philosophy is the same. They looked at old MMorpgs and asked themselves "what is the single thing the majority of players hate?" Dowtime in a game. having to wait hours for a group cause that is the only way to do things.And so they decided to be off with it.
What the second thing most gamers hate in a game? Repetitive grind. do same thing over and over for no reason at all. And so here comes missions and quests. In that respect, WoW got the upper hand as CoH didn't have a full mission oriented game (you can do missions, yes, but they are not enough to bring you from level 1 to max. you have to grind at a certain point.. actually more at certain points...like at level 24, or level 14 there is a level gap in which your old contacts are out of missions and your new ones tell you to get back at 15/25, maybe it changed now? i have seen just feature 1 eh ) but it tried its best.
I wager that other future mmorpg will be done in the same way.
Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa are already getting out the third most hated thing in games: long, boring, uneventful travelling times.
As for the economy, while it is true that money is self generated and as such a certain amount of inflaction is compulsory, i also believe that the ebay process ACCELERATE such thing and makes it much worse for the casual gamers that are not level 60 and won't be for months.
As such, i am quite against it.
have a nice day
It does speed up inflation but so what? It's all the same. I mean lets take allowance as an example:
20 years ago kids got fifty cents for allowance. Candy Bars cost a quarter, so kids could by 2 candy bars with thier allowance.
Today kids get a dollar for allowance. Candy Bars cost fifty cents, so kids can buy 2 candy bars with thier allowance.
In this example what's changed? Absolutely nothing everything is exactly like same.
I know alot of people that ebay for items in mmorpg's.It means nothing to them to do this, as long as they get what they want in a short time.I have a roomate that plays these games just to ebay items.I don't do it,and we have had debates about it.He laughs and says hey people are willing to buy so why not make extra money.
He starts a game,goes to ebay,buys a insane amount of ingame money and goes shopping for stuff to sell on ebay at unreal prices.And he makes sick money doing it.So the first real money he spent is made up in no time at all.
I know 6 other people that do this.And i'm proud to say i have'nt done it yet.Because i like to actually play the games and have fun.But these people don't care,its a side bussiness to them.
Another aspect that is screws up (and forgive me if someone else brought it up already and I missed it), is that not only does it skew the value of a "Gold Piece", but in the end, the people that non-stop farm areas ruins it.
For example, in EQ, there is a guy that non-stop farms items of specific named mobs on a timer. No one else has an opportunity to experience this game content because this person tracks it, and kills it each and everytime. As a person trying to progress through the game, eventually you have to get to this point, and with a farmer dominating the spawn, what can you do?
Another thing I've seen is the people in the AH (in WoW) that dominate the "short time left" auctions. They find someone that bid on something, they watch it like a hawk, and make sure they buy it. Then, they put the item back up for sale for another 10-20% more, and sometimes they even say in "/say" no less, the item is back up for sale with a xx buyout.
I always wondered about the lvl 1 players at the AH in wow.I don't ever remember seeing anything there that a lvl 1 player could use.Are these ebayers?
Originally posted by Jodokai It does speed up inflation but so what? It's all the same. I mean lets take allowance as an example: 20 years ago kids got fifty cents for allowance. Candy Bars cost a quarter, so kids could by 2 candy bars with thier allowance. Today kids get a dollar for allowance. Candy Bars cost fifty cents, so kids can buy 2 candy bars with thier allowance. In this example what's changed? Absolutely nothing everything is exactly like same.
Nothing changed and that's the problem. The monsters still drop fifty cents after 20 years, so the guy that plays by the rules only can buy one candy bar now.
Right but monsters drop candy bars too. So the non-ebayer can sell it for a dollar when before they could only sell it for fifty cents. So now the non-ebayer gets some of that money floating around too. Again it all balances out.
It balances out if you as a player start selling in the market instead of regular vendors in the game. I have no time or patience to sell things in auction house or worse yet to advertise and sell directly to other players Someone who just wants to play a game with their friends in a persistent world will get behind every time.
Of course the fault is with the players who complain. Can't they see they just have to start selling virtual items to enjoy the game? Easy cash baby. :P
Its just like with the real world and marketing... buying something cheaper and selling it for more.. people have to strive in the economy and if its bartering with prices and turning around selling them for more expensive then so be it i know people who did that with lineage (sold their accounts on ebay for big bucks and went and made another account.. theres money to make out there because some kids who have money just want to have that really high level account)
Comments
You keep saying that but I havn't seen any proof from you.
You want proof? Do an ebay search for Stwars Galaxies Credits, then do a search for Everquest Gold. You'll find tons of aucitons for this stuff, and the economy is the same now as it has been. New players can buy the new guns they need until they get to the level where they can make the money to by the high end stuff, just like it always has been. Why would you think WoW would be any different?.
This whole thing gets blown out of proporiton by people that don't think it's right to buy on ebay. Again I'm not going to argue the ethics of it, but what it boils down to is there is a group of people that think buying money on ebay is wrong and it isn't fair. They worked for thier gold why should someone else take the easy road. When they make that argument publicly, they get attacked by the people that like selling or buying gold on ebay.
This forces the Con group to come up with all sorts of reasons why buying them is evil. The argument that "it's not fair", while perfectly valid, doesn't seem strong enough to sway opinions, so they resort to scare tactics. "The economy will be ruined, the world will end and there will be total anarachy" sounds much more convincing than: "It's not fair".
So again the only thing that can really jack up an economy is money duping, and even that is to a limited extent.
If you have an economy where money just appears out of nowhere you will always have a high inflation. Prices will always escalate unless there is some kind of mechanism to withdraw excess money out of the economy (taxes, regular expenses, etc) with a significant effect.
Selling items on Ebay will make it worse, but the problems that need to be adressed in every dynamic MMORPG economy are more basic than that.
IMHO of course.
I cant believe that thousands of idiots are going to type /signed and think they are having an impact.
It just goes to show that you cant bring some people out of their fantasy world.
People will always Ebay items and characters until you come up with a game where:
a) there is no grind to level 2342343242
b) the endgame is accessable to everyone from the start (yes I know that kind of destroys the def. of endgame)
Some people dont want to play 90 levels of crap to get to the real game...but they do like the world and the genre. Can you blame them? I wont.
And as for farmed gold...thats another inherent problem of MMOs that Blizzard should working on fixing VIA THE IN-GAME GAMEPLAY. A game could be created with scarcity and economic controls, but they didnt do it this time. So the ubah will always be ubah. High level guys will always have better gear than you...just like in EQ1. And the lowly will pay to get upgraded. Dont hate people because they just want to have as much fun as people with 90000 hours to play.
my understanding in WoW ATM is that the process of getting income happens within THE NATURAL FLOW OF THE GAME. Now, sit back and think about what i just said. if u wana go grind some xp solo your going to obtain gold while u do this. the idea is that in any mmo game there should never be a time where the thought goes thro my head "shiz i gota go earn $$$" and every game that has that in it is a dead game. it is dead because ITS NOT A GAME , ITS A JOB.
After playing ffxi , for me a great mmo game is as follows.
No time sink, I get to do what i want when i want. If i wana go logon for 2 hours and customize/xp my toon BY MYSELF or WITH OTHERS that should be MY CHOICE. No other game offers that but WoW. Go play any of the other eq clones? you depend on others and frankly that blows. Basicly what i want in mmo is a very good single player RPG but to have the high end / raid content for which i need to work with others but outside of that, my time is my own. WoW is the first mmorpg to give GAMERS FREEDOM. You name me any other mmo game where you can just logon and do what you want? shiz i couldnt do that in eqpc nor ffxi. If you gota wait hours to go do something then thats not content and reading a good novel is different then reading the damn phone book... EQ/SOE mmo games have always been the nynex yellow pages of rpgs... If i sound a little grumpy then i am because I WANT MY 4 YEARS BACK.
Grunk 74 DRK , Nero 60 Warrior EQ
City of Heroes you can log on do what you want for a few minutes solo or with groups and log off. Funny how similar the two games are.
as much as i want to beleave that we will make a diffence wow gold seems so show otherwise.
this is what ruined lineage2 for most people, ebay, ige.com (wich advertises on this site), farmers and bots... and to top it of a usless NCinteractive staff :26
...
majority of players that left l2 for wow did it becaus of herrasing, rude farmers, ebay and ige, and a totaly screwed up economy, saying that Blizzard would protect its economy and its game. as much as i love to be right, it actualy sux to be right in this case. chances are that wow will go economy wise the same way as l2
...
i'we played NA wow since the start, it was insane in the open beta and heaven for the first few weeks of retail, howewer since then the game went downwords... unlike most people that complain now about the state of the game, i left and am looking forward to a new one D&L
best wishes to people who stayed with wow, the ones that like the game and enjoy playing it...
as far as farmers, bots, ebayers and fanbois go... you can drop dead
So not true. At best you could argue that is simply accelerates the process. As was already mentioned the money is in the game, right? So here you are level 60 and wanting to start a new toon. You then buy the items for your new character with your old one. You then transfer the items to the new character and some money. So unless you are going to prevent older characters from transfering money and items to lower level characters you still are going to have inflation.
The problem with most gaming economies is inflation. The reason is that the level of gold in the game is constantly decreasing. This lowers the value of gold and will lead to the raising of prices. No matter how well off the economy starts it will go bad unless there is some way to take out most of the wealth put into the world in the first place.
Given how pathetically easy it is to level in WoW anyway, the economy will suffer more than others because of inflation. Instead of trying to prevent those from selling gold, perhaps suggesting ways for WoW to fix the economy would be better. Because whether the money come to the level 1 from his level 60 alt, or from ebay he is still going to get the money.
that's because the main ground philosophy is the same. They looked at old MMorpgs and asked themselves "what is the single thing the majority of players hate?" Dowtime in a game. having to wait hours for a group cause that is the only way to do things.And so they decided to be off with it.
What the second thing most gamers hate in a game? Repetitive grind. do same thing over and over for no reason at all. And so here comes missions and quests. In that respect, WoW got the upper hand as CoH didn't have a full mission oriented game (you can do missions, yes, but they are not enough to bring you from level 1 to max. you have to grind at a certain point.. actually more at certain points...like at level 24, or level 14 there is a level gap in which your old contacts are out of missions and your new ones tell you to get back at 15/25, maybe it changed now? i have seen just feature 1 eh
) but it tried its best.
I wager that other future mmorpg will be done in the same way.
Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa are already getting out the third most hated thing in games: long, boring, uneventful travelling times.
As for the economy, while it is true that money is self generated and as such a certain amount of inflaction is compulsory, i also believe that the ebay process ACCELERATE such thing and makes it much worse for the casual gamers that are not level 60 and won't be for months.
As such, i am quite against it.
have a nice day
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime"
In reference to subject of that topic I want to say that there is no way to stop ppl from seeling their accounts.
Unfortunately I doubt if it will be ever possible, but what can we do - stop playing mmorpgs ? We have to used to it......
that's because the main ground philosophy is the same. They looked at old MMorpgs and asked themselves "what is the single thing the majority of players hate?" Dowtime in a game. having to wait hours for a group cause that is the only way to do things.And so they decided to be off with it.
What the second thing most gamers hate in a game? Repetitive grind. do same thing over and over for no reason at all. And so here comes missions and quests. In that respect, WoW got the upper hand as CoH didn't have a full mission oriented game (you can do missions, yes, but they are not enough to bring you from level 1 to max. you have to grind at a certain point.. actually more at certain points...like at level 24, or level 14 there is a level gap in which your old contacts are out of missions and your new ones tell you to get back at 15/25, maybe it changed now? i have seen just feature 1 eh
) but it tried its best.
I wager that other future mmorpg will be done in the same way.
Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa are already getting out the third most hated thing in games: long, boring, uneventful travelling times.
As for the economy, while it is true that money is self generated and as such a certain amount of inflaction is compulsory, i also believe that the ebay process ACCELERATE such thing and makes it much worse for the casual gamers that are not level 60 and won't be for months.
As such, i am quite against it.
have a nice day
It does speed up inflation but so what? It's all the same. I mean lets take allowance as an example:
20 years ago kids got fifty cents for allowance. Candy Bars cost a quarter, so kids could by 2 candy bars with thier allowance.
Today kids get a dollar for allowance. Candy Bars cost fifty cents, so kids can buy 2 candy bars with thier allowance.
In this example what's changed? Absolutely nothing everything is exactly like same.
I know alot of people that ebay for items in mmorpg's.It means nothing to them to do this, as long as they get what they want in a short time.I have a roomate that plays these games just to ebay items.I don't do it,and we have had debates about it.He laughs and says hey people are willing to buy so why not make extra money.
He starts a game,goes to ebay,buys a insane amount of ingame money and goes shopping for stuff to sell on ebay at unreal prices.And he makes sick money doing it.So the first real money he spent is made up in no time at all.
I know 6 other people that do this.And i'm proud to say i have'nt done it yet.Because i like to actually play the games and have fun.But these people don't care,its a side bussiness to them.
Another aspect that is screws up (and forgive me if someone else brought it up already and I missed it), is that not only does it skew the value of a "Gold Piece", but in the end, the people that non-stop farm areas ruins it.
For example, in EQ, there is a guy that non-stop farms items of specific named mobs on a timer. No one else has an opportunity to experience this game content because this person tracks it, and kills it each and everytime. As a person trying to progress through the game, eventually you have to get to this point, and with a farmer dominating the spawn, what can you do?
Another thing I've seen is the people in the AH (in WoW) that dominate the "short time left" auctions. They find someone that bid on something, they watch it like a hawk, and make sure they buy it. Then, they put the item back up for sale for another 10-20% more, and sometimes they even say in "/say" no less, the item is back up for sale with a xx buyout.
Plat Farmers ruin the game
Shagz
EverQuest - Shaman, Saryrn Server... Retired
WoW - Warrior, Alleria Server
I always wondered about the lvl 1 players at the AH in wow.I don't ever remember seeing anything there that a lvl 1 player could use.Are these ebayers?
Nothing changed and that's the problem. The monsters still drop fifty cents after 20 years, so the guy that plays by the rules only can buy one candy bar now.
It balances out if you as a player start selling in the market instead of regular vendors in the game. I have no time or patience to sell things in auction house or worse yet to advertise and sell directly to other players Someone who just wants to play a game with their friends in a persistent world will get behind every time.
Of course the fault is with the players who complain. Can't they see they just have to start selling virtual items to enjoy the game? Easy cash baby. :P
Its just like with the real world and marketing... buying something cheaper and selling it for more.. people have to strive in the economy and if its bartering with prices and turning around selling them for more expensive then so be it
i know people who did that with lineage (sold their accounts on ebay for big bucks and went and made another account.. theres money to make out there because some kids who have money just want to have that really high level account)
the devil i tell ya